I have been a woman for 46 years and I only recently realized I can't change it and I like it.
— Isabel Allende
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.
I was not supposed to be in any way a liberated person. I was a female born in the '40s in a patriarchal family; I was supposed to marry and make everyone around me happy.
I was a lousy journalist. I could never be objective. Sometimes I invented the whole story.
I don't want an uneventful and safe life, I prefer an adventurous one.
Heart is what drives us and determines our fate.
Although women do two-thirds of the world's labor, they own less than one percent of the world's assets.
I can promise you that women working together - linked, informed and educated - can bring peace and prosperity to this forsaken planet.
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.
I've been a story-teller all my life but I realized it only recently.
I try to let go of the intellect and just tell the story. I only read the page I have in front of me on the screen. Then when the whole story is told, I print it, wait a week and read it.
I don't think I would be a writer if I had stayed in Chile. I would be trapped in the chores, in the family, in the person that people expected me to be.
I tend to see the similarities in people and not the differences.
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.
For real change, we need feminine energy in the management of the world. We need a critical number of women in positions of power, and we need to nurture the feminine energy in men.
What I fear most is power with impunity. I fear abuse of power, and the power to abuse.
Feminism is dated? Yes, for privileged women like my daughter and all of us here today, but not for most of our sisters in the rest of the world who are still forced into premature marriage, prostitution, forced labor - they have children that they don't want or they cannot feed.
I'm aware of the mystery around us, so I write about coincidences, premonitions, emotions, dreams, the power of nature, magic.
I'm living in California but I have a place that is mine in Chile and I belong there. I am no longer an exile.
The fact that I am a writer comes from the experience of being cut away from my roots and living in Venezuela, where I couldn't find a place for myself, for years and years.
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.
Roots are not in landscape or a country, or a people, they are inside you.
I have learned many things in the 30 years that I have been writing.
Giving women education, work, the ability to control their own income, inherit and own property, benefits the society. If a woman is empowered, her children and her family will be better off. If families prosper, the village prospers, and eventually so does the whole country.
We want a world where life is preserved, and the quality of life is enriched for everybody, not only for the privileged.
I was born in ancient times, at the end of the world, in a patriarchal Catholic and conservative family. No wonder that by age five I was a raging feminist - although the term had not reached Chile yet, so nobody knew what the heck was wrong with me.
All stories interest me, and some haunt me until I end up writing them. Certain themes keep coming up: justice, loyalty, violence, death, political and social issues, freedom.
