Isabel Allende Stories Quotations

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.

one of those unforgettable stories that stays with you for years.

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.

What is truer than truth? Answer: the story.

I need to tell a story. It's an obsession. Each story is a seed inside of me that starts to grow and grow, like a tumor, and I have to deal with it sooner or later.