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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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Isabel Allende
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: August 2
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
City of the Kings
Isabel Allende Llona
Interested
Circumstances
Happens
Character
Live
Always
Conditioned
Following
Characters

More quotes by Isabel Allende

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I am very grateful for the success, because it has given me the freedom to write without pressure, in my own way, and has enabled me to maintain my family and educate my children and grandchildren, as well as to create a Foundation to empower women and girls.
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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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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Happiness is pure kitch we come into the world to suffer and learn.
Isabel Allende
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I'm not willing to sign a contract. They want everything. They want the rights to do the movie and everything else they can think of, forever. There's no limit to the contract. In this universe and universes to be discovered - I'm not making this up - this is in the contract.
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 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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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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I have learned many things in the 30 years that I have been writing.
Isabel Allende
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I need to remember to overcome.
Isabel Allende
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She regretted nothing she had shared with her lover, nor was she ashamed of the fires that had changed her life just the opposite, she felt that they had tempered her, made her strong, given her pride in making decisions and paying the consequences for them.
Isabel Allende
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The hardest thing of love is to let go.
Isabel Allende
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People come from internally, from other places in the United States, but also displaced people from other parts of the world. They come here. If you walk in the streets of San Francisco, you hear all the languages. You smell all the foods. You listen to the music from everywhere. There's great diversity.
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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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.
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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My books are based on emotions, feelings, relationships. In these areas women are experts, so it's not strange that the main characters of my novels are females.
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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Humanity has this need to hear stories because they connect us with other people, they teach us about our own feelings. We feel less lonely when we see other people going through the same things, even if they're fictional characters.
Isabel Allende
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He had only to touch me to turn my tears into sighs and my anger to desire. How accomodating love is it forgives everything.
Isabel Allende