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
one of those unforgettable stories that stays with you for years.
My books are written from personal experience, from memories, and from stories that come to me from all places.
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.
Before I start writing, before I have an idea of where and when the story happens, I research it thoroughly.
I have a very acute sense of place and time, so all of my stories are rooted in a place and a time.
Some people connect with a story and may find between the lines something that might be useful to him or her, but that's not the intention of the author, I think. At least not mine.
All stories interest me, and some haunt me until I end up writing them.
A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration.
When you tell a story in the kitchen to a friend, it's full of mistakes and repetitions. It's good to avoid that in literature, but still, a story should feel like a conversation. It's not a lecture.
If you change the way you tell your own story, you can change the colour and create a life in technicolour.
I've been a story-teller all my life but I realized it only recently.
I have travelled all over the world and one thing that amazes me is that I can communicate with people. My story may be different but emotionally we are all the same.
I was a lousy journalist. I could never be objective. Sometimes I invented the whole story.
Each of us chooses the tone for telling his or her own story. I would like to choose the durable clarity of a platinum print, but nothing in my destiny possesses the luminosity. I live among diffuse shadings, veiled mysteries, uncertainties; the tone of telling my life is closer to that of a portrait in sepia.