The idea of the book ["The Japanese Lover"] came in a conversation that I had with a friend walking in the streets of New York. We were talking about our mothers, and I was telling her how old my mother was, and she was telling me about her mother. Her mother was Jewish, and she said that she was in a retirement home and that she had had a friend for 40 years that was a Japanese gardener. This person had been very important in my friend's upbringing.
Isabel AllendeHe had only to touch me to turn my tears into sighs and my anger to desire. How accomodating love is; it forgives everything.
Isabel AllendeFrom journalism I learned to write under pressure, to work with deadlines, to have limited space and time, to conduct and interview, to find information, to research, and above all, to use language as efficiently as possible and to remember always that there is a reader out there.
Isabel AllendeThe fact that I am a writer comes from the experience of being cut away from my roots and living in Venezuela, where I couldn't find a place for myself, for years and years.
Isabel AllendeWe don't have an explanation for everything that happens. We don't control almost anything. And if we are not open to that mystery, life becomes so small.
Isabel Allende...memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously.
Isabel Allende