Quotes by Isabel Allende

About Isabel Allende:

Isabel Allende is a Chilean-American writer. Allende, whose works sometimes contain aspects of the "magic realist" tradition, is famous for novels such as The House of the Spirits (La casa de los espíritus, 1982) and City of the Beasts (La ciudad de las bestias, 2002), which have been commercially successful. Allende has been called "the world's most widely read Spanish-language author". In 2004, Allende was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2010, she received Chile's National Literature Prize. President Barack Obama awarded her the 2014 Presidential Medal of Freedom.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I like Hillary Clinton a lot. I know her.

Isabel Allende

I have written about Chile extensively, and therefore I have read many books on the subject, mostly for research.

Isabel Allende

The world starts to exist, for Americans, when we are in conflict with a place. And then all of a sudden, Afghanistan pops up on the TV screen and it becomes a place. And it exists for three weeks, and then it disappears into thin air.

Isabel Allende

I was a very bad journalist. Awful. I would just invent everything. If I did an interview, I had a preconception of what that person should say and I would put my words in his mouth.

Isabel Allende

I don't think the world will destroy itself in a nuclear cataclysm. On the contrary, we have the capacity to save ourselves and save the planet, and we will use it.

Isabel Allende

I'm a writer. In Latin America, they say I'm a Latin-American writer because I also write in Spanish and my books are translated, but I am an American citizen and my books are published here, so I'm also an American writer.

Isabel Allende

I try to write the kind of books I like to read.

Isabel Allende

You couldn't find two people more different than my mother and I. There are a thousand things about me that she fought against.

Isabel Allende

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

Isabel Allende

We only have what we give.

Isabel Allende

Accept the children the way we accept trees—with gratitude, because they are a blessing—but do not have expectations or desires. You don’t expect trees to change, you love them as they are.

Isabel Allende

Death, with its ancestral weight of terrors, is merely the abandonment of an unserviceable shell at the time the spiritis reintegrated into the unified energy of the cosmos. The end of life, like birth, is a stagein a voyage, and deserves the compass...

Isabel Allende

Wishes and fears are illusions, Dil Bahadur, not realities. You must practice detachment.

Isabel Allende

He understood then that all his exploits as a reporter, the feats that had won him such recognition and fame, were merely an attempt to keep his most ancient fears at bay, a stratagem for taking refuge behind a lens to test whether reality was more t...

Isabel Allende

My death..I mean..will it be quick,and with dignity? How will i know when the end is coming?" "When you vomit blood,sir," Tao Chi'en said sadly. That happened three weeks later,in the middle of Pacific,in the privacy of the captain's cabin. As soon a...

Isabel Allende

Seated by her side in the narrow cabin, pressing cold compresses to her forehead and holding her while she vomited, he felt profoundly happy....

Isabel Allende

I have seen these persons speak unthinkingly, not realizing that to speak is also to be. Word and gesture are man's thought. We should not speak without reason.

Isabel Allende

Write what should not be forgotten.

Isabel Allende

Writing is like making love. Don't worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process.

Isabel Allende

I rebelled against all form of authority, against my grandfather, my step-father, the Church, the police, the government, the bosses. Everything male that was there, and was determining my life.

Isabel Allende

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 th...

Isabel Allende

Author Bio

  • NameIsabel Allende
  • DescriptionChilean writer
  • AliasesIsabel Allende Llona
  • BornAugust 2, 1942
  • CountryChile
  • ProfessionWriter; Journalist
  • WorksZorro; The House Of The Spirits
  • AwardsNational Prize For Literature; Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award