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
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.
In my book tours I get to meet an audience every night. And I see that there are mostly young people, and there are a lot of more men than before, but always young, I don't get older men. As I'm getting older, my audience gets younger!
The idea of the book [Japanes Lover] came in a conversation that I had with a friend walking in the streets of New York. We were talking about our mothers, and I was telling her how old my mother was, and she was telling me about her mother. Her mother was Jewish, and she said that she was in a retirement home and that she had had a friend for 40 years that was a Japanese gardener. This person had been very important in my friend's upbringing.
The first few months of my life of every year are in total retreat. I don't see anybody except my husband and my dog, I don't talk to anybody, and I just write.
At the most difficult moments of my life, when it seemed that every door was closed to me, the taste of those apricots comes back to comfort me with the notion that abundance is always within reach, if only one knows how to find it.
The fastest-growing population in the United States is the older people, because we are living much longer, healthier lives. The problem is, individuals often don't have the resources to take care of older people as they age. This is something that is happening, and we have to deal with it. It was happening also in my life.
The source of my difficulties has always been the same: an inability to accept what to others seems natural, and an irresistible tendency to voice opinions no one wants to hear . . .
Most people feel younger than their age, but the culture values youth, success, beauty, productivity. There is no space in this culture for older people.
Affection is like the noonday sun; it does not need the presence of another to be manifest.