Isabel Allende Quotes

Writing is my job. I don't think of it as art.

It is common knowledge that no man that women flock to boasts of his conquests. Those who do, lie.

But I don't want more things than I need, either.

Women have always been courageous... They are always fearless when protecting their children and in the last century they have been fearless in the fight for their rights.

If I didn't write my soul would dry up and die.

We need a global approach to this from all sides. We need to educate people, we need the scientists to create new technologies, we need the engineers to create the networks, we need every human being to be aware of how precious water is and save it. Everybody has to be involved in a very firm and assertive way.

I can promise you that women working together - linked, informed and educated - can bring peace and prosperity to this forsaken planet.

Having a point to start is important. You know that when you decide to write something it's like a commitment. It's like falling in love.

If this world is going to be a better place for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, it will be women who make it so.

Life is very mysterious and there are many things we don't know. And there are elements of magic realism in every culture, everywhere. It's just accepting that we don't know everything and everything is possible.

A novel is like a window, open to an infinite landscape.

They could not understand the advantage of living contrary to their inclinations in this world in order to enjoy a hypothetical well-being in another.

...when everything else fails, we communicate in the language of the stars

The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.

I tend to see the similarities in people and not the differences.

At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of the imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me.

Now of course we have Black historians, but they're usually men. We get the perspective always, the slanted perspective, of what has happened. The battles, the things achieved, the laws, but where are the people, the families? What happens inside the houses, inside the minds and the hearts? That's what I'm interested in.

When you make an omelet, as when you make love, affection counts for more than technique.

Friendship is all about trust and sharing. Passionate and romantic love is all about sex and emotions. You have to try to combine those, I think. The great marriages, the great couples I know, have both.

We only appreciate what we have when we lose it.

When I started working in a feminist feminine magazine all my life was about rebelling against male authority, which is authority in general is male, so it was rebelling against everything. Everything that was around me made me angry.

How many times have I told you not to believe everything you hear? Seek truth for yourself.

My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else's.

All stories interest me, and some haunt me until I end up writing them.

No complaining about how hard it is to write, we are all so, so lucky to write, to sit down, inside, and write words on paper. There is no greater freedom, no greater good, nothing that brings more joy.

I'm not a fan of mysteries, so to prepare for this experience of writing a mystery I started reading the most successful ones in the market in 2012. And I realized I cannot write that kind of book. It's too gruesome, too violent, too dark; there's no redemption there.

Barrabas came to us by the sea.

Many children fly like birds, guess other people's dreams, and speak with ghosts, but ... they all outgrow it when they lose their innocence.

if we don't begin by imagining the perfect society, how shall we create one?

I have a hundred-year-old aunt who aspires to sainthood, and whose only wish has been to go into the convent, but no congregation, not even the Little Sisters of Charity, could tolerate her for more than a few weeks, so the family has had to look after her. Believe me, there is nothing so insufferable as a saint, I wouldn't sic one on my worst enemy.

My writing comes not from the happy moments, but from struggle and grief.

Giving women education, work, the ability to control their own income, inherit and own property, benefits the society. If a woman is empowered, her children and her family will be better off. If families prosper, the village prospers, and eventually so does the whole country.

Society decides when we get old. But the spirit never ages.

I'm interested in people who have to overcome obstacles, people who are not sheltered by the umbrella of the establishment, marginals.

The fear is not real, Dil Bahadur; it is only in your mind, like all other things. Our thoughts form what we believe to be reality.

He realized...that the loudest are the least sincere, that arrogance is a quality of the ignorant, and that flatterers tend to be vicious.

In 2011, I announced that I was going to retire, and my agent panicked. So she says: No, no, no. You have to write a book with your husband.

I was born in the middle of the Second World War when the United States dropped their atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when millions of people were dying in concentration camps, when half the planet were colonies that belonged to empires. The word feminism didn't exist. And in my lifetime I have seen all these things improved, changed. We are more connected, more informed. We can fight against stuff together in ways we couldn't before.

My mum said that as you age you have to smell good and be clean and don't hate anybody because that makes you older. Um I don't agree. I think that of course you have to smell good and be clean but there's much more that you have to do. Don't complain, exercise, be be strong, um work, be creative, be related to the world, have causes, fight for them passionately. I think all those things are important. I I'm not going to give up and just smell good.

Women age more in company because they have more relationships. Men have buddies. They have acquaintances, they have comrades. Friends as women have, the friends that of the soul that you share everything, that you witness each other's lives, that you talk their, your, heart out, that you cry with, that you ask money when you need, that.

As my Popo used to say, life is a tapestry we weave day by day with threads of different colors, some heavy and dark, others thin and bright, all the threads having their uses. The stupid things I did are already in the tapestry, indelible, but I’m not going to be weighed down by them till I die. What’s done is done; I have to look ahead.

I love my dog unconditionally, but never the man I'm sleeping with.

I feel that my life and therefore my writing accept the possibility of all the mystery. Everything we don't know; everything that can possibly happen.

Write what should not be forgotten.

I don't read thrillers, romance or mystery, and I don't read self-help books because I don't believe in shortcuts and loopholes.

From 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.

I'm aware of the mystery around us, so I write about coincidences, premonitions, emotions, dreams, the power of nature, magic.

Writing is a process, a journey into memory and the soul.