Isabel Allende Quotes

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

Writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.

It's like these ideas, these characters, kind of bubble up inside me, and one day they're not there, and the next day they are there. They're alive, and they're whispering in my head and all that stuff, and I want to write about those things.

Where story comes from, I don't know. I know that I become obsessed with something. An idea, an image, a person, the way a person talks. And then something starts happening that I can't explain, and it has a lot to do with language.

A book comes and says, 'Write me.' My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I can do is listen to it, do what it tells me and collaborate.

For me, the source material can come from anywhere. It can be a poem, it can be a dream, it can be a movie, as long as the end part of it is interesting - that's what it's about for me.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song—be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it.

A piece of writing is like a piece of magic. You create something out of nothing.

A novel is a performance you have to plan.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.

A book comes and says, 'Write me.

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.

I always write a story in one sitting.

How I work is that I write a story I'd like to read. Then you fly to Paris or Sydney and the interviewers talk about the greater significance of your work.

Though The Kite Runner was my first completed novel, I had been writing on and off for most of my life, primarily short stories, and primarily for myself.

Writing a novel is a lot like reading one.

I hardly know what I'm going to write - an article, a story, a poem in free verse - or in some regular form. I only know that when I have the first sentence. And when the first sentence makes a kind of pattern, then I find out the kind of rhythm I'm looking for.

Writing is a mysterious activity.

I don't have a name and I don't have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel.

If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.

Blank paper has always inspired me.

Stories come to me and I don't know where they come from, but afterwards I can look back and say, 'Oh yes, that's got a little bit of me, or a little bit of my own son in it'. That's where ideas come from.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.