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" I was a political refugee living in Venezuela. I had a job that was twelve hours a day, no money. It was a hard time. "
Isabel Allende
Money
Time
Political
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" 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
America
Say
I Am
" On a Tuesday, September 11th, 1973, we had the military coup in Chile that forced me to leave my country eventually. And then, on a Tuesday, September 11th, 2001, we had the terrorist attack in the United States. "
Isabel Allende
Me
Country
Leave
" Nice people with common sense do not make interesting characters. They only make good former spouses. "
Isabel Allende
Interesting
Nice
People
" I remember my childhood as a horrible time. My mother says that nothing so horrible ever happened to me as the things that I remember. "
Isabel Allende
Time
Me
Childhood
" I am happier when I love than when I am loved. I adore my husband, my son, my grandchildren, my mother, my dog, and frankly, I don't know if they even like me. But who cares? Loving them is my joy. "
Isabel Allende
Dog
Son
Love
" I write a letter to my mother every day, because in that letter, I write down my day. And if I don't write it down, then tomorrow I will forget it and it's gone. "
Isabel Allende
Forget
Mother
Tomorrow
" I have been a foreigner all my life, first as a daughter of diplomats, then as a political refugee and now as an immigrant in the U.S. I have had to leave everything behind and start anew several times, and I have lost most of my extended family. "
Isabel Allende
Family
Start
My Life
" All summer, I read fiction because you must read for the pleasure and beauty of it, and not only for research. 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. "
Isabel Allende
Mystery
Research
Believe
" Everything I write has to be connected to my life. One of the things that always comes up in my writing is the search for freedom, especially in women. "
Isabel Allende
Writing
Freedom
Life
" 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. "
Isabel Allende
Book
Writing
Understand
" For real change, we need feminine energy in the management of the world. We need a critical number of women in positions of power, and we need to nurture the feminine energy in men. "
Isabel Allende
Management
Change
Women
" 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! "
Isabel Allende
Media
Women
Care
" 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
Mouth
Say
Words
" Feminism is not dead, by no means. It has evolved. If you don't like the term, change it, for Goddess' sake. Call it Aphrodite, or Venus, or bimbo, or whatever you want; the name doesn't matter, as long as we understand what it is about, and we support it. "
Isabel Allende
Name
Long
Change
" 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.' My husband is a writer of crime novels. His name is William Gordon. And so I had to accommodate to his style because that's what he writes. So we decided we'd give it a try. Well, we almost divorced. "
Isabel Allende
You
Book
Husband
" Empowering women means trusting them. "
Isabel Allende
Means
Trusting
Women
" It is in giving that I connect with others, with the world and with the divine. "
Isabel Allende
Divine
World
Others
" 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. "
Isabel Allende
Life
Chaos
Whatever
" 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. "
Isabel Allende
Young
Writing
Smart
" 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
Up
Conflict
Air
" 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. "
Isabel Allende
Research
Work
Language
" I was not supposed to be in any way a liberated person. I was a female born in the '40s in a patriarchal family; I was supposed to marry and make everyone around me happy. "
Isabel Allende
Family
Way
Person
" I can't control life for my grandchildren, so how could I control a story? Sometimes I try to force something, and after working and working on that chapter, I realise that I am swimming against the current. I will never get there. So I have to let go of whatever previous idea I had about it and let the characters decide. "
Isabel Allende
Story
Life
Swimming
" I speak English and Spanish. I write in Spanish; my books are published in English. "
Isabel Allende
Write
Speak
Spanish
" 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. "
Isabel Allende
Daughter
Women
Children
" 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. "
Isabel Allende
Relationship
Daily
Life
" Many fiction writers write for the critics or for themselves; they forget the common reader. I never do. I don't think journalism clashes with my fiction; on the contrary, it helps enormously. "
Isabel Allende
Journalism
Forget
Write
" We want a world where life is preserved, and the quality of life is enriched for everybody, not only for the privileged. "
Isabel Allende
Life
World
Where
" I have more freedom when I write fiction, but my memoirs have had a much stronger impact on my readers. Somehow the 'message,' even if I am not even aware that there is one, is conveyed better in this form. "
Isabel Allende
I Am
Freedom
Better
" I think that any writer who is commercial, who sells a lot of books, has to face criticism. Because the more hermetic and the more difficult your book is, supposedly it's better. "
Isabel Allende
Better
Think
Face