Isabel Allende Quotes

You never know what you're going to end up with when you sit down to write something. At the end, if it holds, it can do this multifarious thing - which is to open things rather than close them, to make them bigger rather than smaller, to cross those divides which we live every day of our lives.

Chance has something to say, even how to write a good letter.

I don't really know what I want, other than good sequences, whatever that means. What I find is always a matter of chance, judgment, and luck.

I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.

Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea.

I consider projects very deeply, but there's always a point in your life where there's a bit of randomity.

We actors are superstitious creatures. We do all the homework, and we put all of the components together, but there's always one key aspect that we're not in charge of, really, and that's magic. You are always on the lookout for where and how that magic is going to ignite.

Writing with you is the only thing that keeps me alive.

Every time I write a song I feel really lucky and kind of surprised. Not surprised that I wrote it, but just surprised that things exist that you don't know about.

All good ideas arrive by chance.

Books are magic: you never know where they're going to end up.

In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write.

Happy accidents are real gifts, and they can open the door to a future that didn't even exist. It's kind of nice sometimes to set up something to encourage or allow happy accidents to happen.

Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.

I write to express my thoughts, my feelings. I want people to think.

I'm trying to communicate here. I'm a communicator, I like to communicate, and if a million people buy it then we've touched a million people, if only 10 people buy it, then we've only touched 10, and that's important, because I'm satisfied with only 10. But, I love a million.

I write what I don't know. It's way more interesting.

Once I knew only darkness and stillness... my life was without past or future... but a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living.

Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.

You write alone, but you write hoping that there will be readers who will connect with what you write, and it's so wonderful and amazing - I can't even tell you - when that actually happens.

I want to offer a word of encouragement to authors: You have to feel called to the message of your book enough that you want people to get that message. When you get to that place, your passion goes through the roof, and then the other stuff happens.

You can find inspiration when you're not even looking for it.

I love the idea of a website/blog being a catalyst for propelling people out into the world, and I enjoy it most when people write me to say that their world looked or smelled or felt a little different because of something that I wrote.

If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.

What's so great about inspiration is sometimes it finds you when you're not looking.