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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

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Isabel Allende
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: August 2
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
City of the Kings
Isabel Allende Llona
Would
Journalist
Mouth
Awful
Mouths
Preconception
Words
Preconceptions
Persons
Interview
Person
Invent
Everything
Interviews

More quotes by Isabel Allende

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I'm not a fan of mysteries, so to prepare for this experience of writing a mystery I started reading the most successful ones in the market in 2012. And I realized I cannot write that kind of book. It's too gruesome, too violent, too dark there's no redemption there.
Isabel Allende
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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.
Isabel Allende
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Heroism is a badly remunerated occupation, and often it leads to an early end, which is why it appeals to fanatics or persons with an unhealthy fascination with death.
Isabel Allende
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Nice people with common sense do not make interesting characters. They only make good former spouses.
Isabel Allende
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You spend the first part of your life collecting things ... and the second half getting rid of them.
Isabel Allende
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Writers speak for those who are kept in silence
Isabel Allende
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Roots are not in landscape or a country, or a people, they are inside you.
Isabel Allende
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I have a very acute sense of place and time, so all of my stories are rooted in a place and a time.
Isabel Allende
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I carry around a little stool to stand on when people want a picture with their cellular phones.
Isabel Allende
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Erotica is using a feather pornograpy is using the whole chicken.
Isabel Allende
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A memoir forces me to stop and remember carefully. It is an exercise in truth. In a memoir, I look at myself, my life, and the people I love the most in the mirror of the blank screen. In a memoir, feelings are more important than facts, and to write honestly, I have to confront my demons.
Isabel Allende
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I'm such a control freak. I want to control even my own death. Decide when I will die and how.
Isabel Allende
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Give, give, give - what is the point of having experience, knowledge or talent if I don't give it away? Of having stories if I don't tell them to others? Of having wealth if I don't share it? I don't intend to be cremated with any of it! It is in giving that I connect with others, with the world and with the divine.
Isabel Allende
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I think the spirit survives when we die, and nothing is wasted in nature and just as our material body disintegrates and becomes something else in the soil. The spirit becomes something else, reunites with a spiritual force that is out there in the universe. Not as individuals but as part of this spirituality.
Isabel Allende
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That is the best part of writing: finding the hidden treasures, giving sparkle to worn out events, invigorating the tired soul with imagination, creating some kind of truth with many lies.
Isabel Allende
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Every person is born with a talent, and happiness depends on discovering that talent in time.
Isabel Allende
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The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.
Isabel Allende
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My books are written from personal experience, from memories, and from stories that come to me from all places.
Isabel Allende
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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.
Isabel Allende
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In terrible moments, in moments of revolution, of war or repression, of illness or death, people react with incredible strength.
Isabel Allende