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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
Awful
Mouths
Preconception
Words
Preconceptions
Persons
Interview
Person
Invent
Everything
Interviews
Would
Journalist
Mouth

More quotes by Isabel Allende

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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
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No complaining about how hard it is to write, we are all so, so lucky to write, to sit down, inside, and write words on paper. There is no greater freedom, no greater good, nothing that brings more joy.
Isabel Allende
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You are my angel and my damnation in your presence I reach divine ecstasy and in your absence I descent to hell.
Isabel Allende
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Friendship is all about trust and sharing. Passionate and romantic love is all about sex and emotions. You have to try to combine those, I think. The great marriages, the great couples I know, have both.
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
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I've been a story-teller all my life but I realized it only recently.
Isabel Allende
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There is room in the human heart for all the divinities.
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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The biggest straitjacket is all the prejudices that we carry around, and all the fears. But what if we just surrender to the fear? There are things greater than fear. The great, wonderful quality of human beings is that we can overcome even absolute terror, and we do.
Isabel Allende
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Fiction happens in the womb. It doesn't get processed in the mind until you do the editing.
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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I'm always following the characters and I'm always interested in what happens to them, but what happens to them is conditioned by the circumstances in which they live.
Isabel Allende
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Writing is my job. I don't think of it as art.
Isabel Allende
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When I started working in a feminist feminine magazine all my life was about rebelling against male authority, which is authority in general is male, so it was rebelling against everything. Everything that was around me made me angry.
Isabel Allende
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Heart is what drives us and determines our fate. That is what I need for my characters in my books: a passionate heart. I need mavericks, dissidents, adventurers, outsiders and rebels, who ask questions, bend the rules and take risks.
Isabel Allende
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Seated by her side in the narrow cabin, pressing cold compresses to her forehead and holding her while she vomited, he felt profoundly happy.
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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...a fixation is very stubborn: it burrows into the brain and breaks the heart. There are many fixations, but love is the worst.
Isabel Allende
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I don't want to die in pain or in an undignified way, I don't want any of the people I love to die in, die painfully. But I'm aware of the fact that they may die before I do and I have to part with them and take the loss. The hardest thing of love is to let go. But I think I can get let go of almost anybody.
Isabel Allende
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Fear is like a black cavern that is terrifying. Once you enter the cavern and explore it, you realize that you can get out of it, go through it and get out of it. Then there's another cavern that is just as big and terrifying, and you just go in and dwell in it and see what is the worst that can happen.
Isabel Allende