Isabel Allende
Isabel Allende
Isabel Allende; born 2 August 1942) 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 Spiritsand City of the Beasts, 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...
NationalityChilean
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth2 August 1942
CityLima, Peru
CountryChile
I don't want posterity, I don't want anybody to remember me in any way. I don't care about that because I'll be dead. I think the spirit will move to some other state.
Many children fly like birds, guess other people's dreams, and speak with ghosts, but ... they all outgrow it when they lose their innocence.
She was one of those people who was born for the greatness of a single love, for exaggerated hatred, for apocalyptic vengance, and for the most sublime forms of heroism but she was unable to shape her fate to the dimensions of her amorous vocation, so it was lived out as something flat and gray trapped between her mother's sickroom walls, wretched tenements, and the tortured confessions with which this large, opulent, hot-blooded woman made for maternity, abundance, action, and ardor- was consuming herself.
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.
I love fiction because in fiction you go into the thoughts of people, the little people, the people who were defeated, the poor, the women, the children that are never in history books.
They could not understand the advantage of living contrary to their inclinations in this world in order to enjoy a hypothetical well-being in another.
Now of course we have Black historians, but they're usually men. We get the perspective always, the slanted perspective, of what has happened. The battles, the things achieved, the laws, but where are the people, the families? What happens inside the houses, inside the minds and the hearts? That's what I'm interested in.
The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.
Erotica is using a feather; pornograpy is using the whole chicken.
If I write something, I fear it will happen, and if I love too much, I fear I will lose that person; nevertheless, I cannot stop writing or loving...
Writing is like making love. Don't worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process.
Memory is fiction. We select the brightest and the darkest, ignoring what we are ashamed of, and so embroider the broad tapestry of our lives.
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.
What I fear most is power with impunity. I fear abuse of power, and the power to abuse.