Quotes By Isabel Allende

I like Hillary Clinton a lot. I know her.

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

Heart is what drives us and determines our fate. That is what I need for my characters in my books: a passionate heart. I need mavericks, dissidents, adventurers, outsiders and rebels, who ask questions, bend the rules and take risks.

The media could do a much better job, that's for sure, especially the media that targets women... Human rights? They couldn't care less!

What I fear most is power with impunity. I fear abuse of power, and the power to abuse.

All stories interest me, and some haunt me until I end up writing them. Certain themes keep coming up: justice, loyalty, violence, death, political and social issues, freedom.

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

I write to understand my circumstances, to sort out the confusion of reality, to exorcise my demons. But most of all, I write because I love it!

I try to let go of the intellect and just tell the story. I only read the page I have in front of me on the screen. Then when the whole story is told, I print it, wait a week and read it.

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.

Empowering women means trusting them.

Roots are not in landscape or a country, or a people, they are inside you.

I was born in ancient times, at the end of the world, in a patriarchal Catholic and conservative family. No wonder that by age five I was a raging feminist - although the term had not reached Chile yet, so nobody knew what the heck was wrong with me.

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

I like historical fiction. I fell in love with New Orleans the first time I visited it. And I wanted to place a story in New Orleans.

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

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

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.

I'm living in California but I have a place that is mine in Chile and I belong there. I am no longer an exile.

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

I was a lousy journalist. I could never be objective. Sometimes I invented the whole story.

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

Although women do two-thirds of the world's labor, they own less than one percent of the world's assets.

I don't want an uneventful and safe life, I prefer an adventurous one.

I am an American citizen and it is my home now. I like the U.S.A., which is not a place too many people have liked since Bush. The U.S. has a young population, and everything can change within a year.

I have learned many things in the 30 years that I have been writing.

The first lie of fiction is that the author gives some order to the chaos of life: chronological order, or whatever order the author chooses.

Today's girls are tomorrow's women - and leaders.

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.

I've been a story-teller all my life but I realized it only recently.