Isabel Allende Quotes - Page 7

When I'm scared - and I'm always scared when I have to face an audience, when I have to read a review, when I publish a book...then, I think of my grandfather. My grandfather was this strong, tough Basque who would never bend....What would he do? Well, he would go ahead, close his eyes, and drive forward. You do it and the spirit that is within you....is there.

Remember that all the others are more afraid than you

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

If you write nonfiction, a historical account of what really happened, first of all, it's always White men who do that and you don't have the voices that are really interesting to me, of the people who are not sheltered by the big umbrella of the establishment.

Love is music, and sex is only the instrument.

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.

I'm such a control freak. I want to control even my own death. Decide when I will die and how.

Fiction happens in the womb. It doesn't get processed in the mind until you do the editing.

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

The writer of good will carries a lamp to illuminate the dark corners.

I'm surrounded by young people. I'm always now the oldest and the shortest person in the room.

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

Fear is like a black cavern that is terrifying. Once you enter the cavern and explore it, you realize that you can get out of it, go through it and get out of it. Then there's another cavern that is just as big and terrifying, and you just go in and dwell in it and see what is the worst that can happen.

Only in romance novels or in thrillers people live outside of a social and political context.

Americans have a warrior's mentality, most of them. That's how this society was built. The fact that you own a gun and shoot to defend your life is a very American way of thinking.

The pain of losing my child was a cleansing experience. I had to throw overboard all excess baggage and keep only what is essential.

That was a good time in my life, in spite of having the sensation of floating on a cloud, surrounded by both lies and things left unspoken. Occasionally I thought I glimpsed the truth, but soon found myself once again lost in a forest of ambiguities.

My books are based on emotions, feelings, relationships. In these areas women are experts, so it's not strange that the main characters of my novels are females.

The most poor and backward areas in the world are those in which women are subjugated and exploited. Improving the situation of the woman improves the family, the community, and by extension the whole country.

I don't want to be looking inside my ego, my stuff, my achievements, my me, me, me, me, I hate that stuff. I just want to be out there eh to the last day of my life ah interested in the world, in causes, in helping other people. Um that doesn't mean that I don't have a spiritual practice, that I don't look at my own soul, that I don't prepare myself for the that transition that death is but I cannot sit in meditation to contemplate my navel for the rest of my life. That would be boring for me.

I do not put myself in a box and say, for instance, I'm writing post-colonial literature. I don't know what I'm writing. That's the business of professors and critics. My job is to tell a story, and that's it.

There's basically an element of fiction in everything you remember. Imagination and memory are almost the same brain processes. When I write fiction, I know that I'm using a bunch of lies that I've made up to create some form of truth. When I write a memoir, I'm using true elements to create something that will always be somehow fictionalized.

I've been so thoroughly incorporated into the California culture that I practice meditation and go to a therapist, even though I always set a trap: during my meditation I invent stories to keep from being bored, and in therapy I invent stories to keep from boring the psychologist.

For women in my lifetime things have changed quite a bit, but not enough. They have only changed for women that have education and access to health care in the Western world. But look at the rest of the world. Still in many places, women are sold into premature marriages, prostitution, forced labor; they are forced to have children that they cannot support or that they don't want. They are abused, tortured, exploited and even killed with impunity.

I need to tell a story. It's an obsession. Each story is a seed inside of me that starts to grow and grow, like a tumor, and I have to deal with it sooner or later.