Quotes from Isabel Allende

The 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.

Feminism is dated? Yes, for privileged women like my daughter and all of us here today, but not for most of our sisters in the rest of the world who are still forced into premature marriage, prostitution, forced labor - they have children that they don't want or they cannot feed.

Kids are smart: don't underestimate their bull detector. Contemporary kids have access to a lot of information, so don't even try to fool them. I have never been more nervous about my research than when writing for young adults because they pick up every single error.

I have travelled all over the world and one thing that amazes me is that I can communicate with people. My story may be different but emotionally we are all the same.

My mother is a great artist, but she always treated her paintings like minor postcards. Had she pursued it, she would have been a great artist. Instead, she looked down on her art.

It is a wonderful truth that things we want most in life-a sense of purpose, happiness and hope-are most easily attained by giving them to others.

I get up every morning early, when the sky is red, and write for 10 hours.

I have not changed; I am still the same girl I was fifty years ago and the same young woman I was in the seventies. I still lust for life, I am still ferociously independent, I still crave justice, and I fall madly in love easily.

In the United States, the fact that you can start again gives a lot of energy and strength and youth to this country. That is why it's so powerful in many ways, and so creative.

Empowering women means trusting them.

The source of my difficulties has always been the same: an inability to accept what to others seems natural, and an irresistible tendency to voice opinions no one wants to hear . . .

When I write fiction, I never try to deliver a message; I just want to tell a story. But I admit that I want the story to be memorable and the characters to touch the reader's heart.

I carry around a little stool to stand on when people want a picture with their cellular phones.

People are afraid of falling in love because they don't want to suffer.

Every life of a character is within a context. If I write detached from a social and political background, my story looks like a soap opera where everybody is indoors, not working and living off their emotions.

The poorest and most backward societies are always those that put women down.

Before the military coup in Chile, we had the idea that military coups happen in Banana Republics, somewhere in Central America. It would never happen in Chile. Chile was such a solid democracy. And when it happened, it had brutal characteristics.

The longest, most solid and complex relationship in my life is with my mother. It started before I was born, and now, when I am 71 and living in California and she is 92 and living in Chile, we are still in touch daily.

If I can write it, I can cope. And I've been writing many books, but in every book, I try to explore something in my own soul that I need to solve, I need to understand.

One of the things that always comes up in my writing is the search for freedom, especially in women. I always write about women who are marginalized, who have no means or resources and somehow manage to get out of those situations with incredible strength - and that is more important than anything.

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

And I am not one of those women who trips twice over the same stone.

Just as when we come into the world, when we die we are afraid of the unknown. But the fear is something from within us that has nothing to do with reality. Dying is like being born: just a change

I was a romantic and sentimental creature, with a tendency towards solitude.