Isabel Allende

"I visualized the book as a string of beads. Each anecdote, each character, was a separate bead strung on one string. That is why I wanted to close the book where it began, as if one had fastened the clasp of a necklace. I also wanted to show that life goes in a circle, that events are intertwined, and that history repeats itself. There is no beginning and no end."

"(About The House of Spirits) All the women in my book are feminists in their fashion; that is, they ask to be free and complete human beings, to be able to fulfill themselves, not to be dependent on men."

"I do realize that human beings are the same everywhere; the differences are not so great. This story of the Trueba family could have happened anywhere."

"When I left Chile, after the military coup, I lost in one instant my family, my past, my home. I felt like a tree without roots, destined to dry up and die. For many years I was paralyzed by a kind of stupor and by nostalgia, but one day in January of 1981, I decided to recover what I had lost. I sat down to write the story of a family similar to mine, the story of a country that could be mine, a continent resembling Latin America... It was almost the act of a conjurer."

"Democratic values have never disappeared from Chile. We must not confuse the Chilean nation with the dictatorship that is ruling it now. Chile is its people, its land, its past, its present, and its future. Pinochet and the evil ones who are with him are an accident in the long life of my country. They will go into history as a misfortune that darkened the sky, but they will go."

"My work as a journalist has been fundamental in my literary creations. Journalism taught me to know and love words, the tools of my trade, the material of my craft. Journalism taught me to search for truth and to try to be objective, how to capture the reader and to hold him firmly and not let him escape. It taught me to synthesize ideas and to be precise about events. And above all, it rid me of any fear of the blank page."

"Already many critics accuse Allende of imitating Garcia Márquez' novel, especially because she writes about a Latin American family, the Truebas, who, just like the Buendia family of the Colombian author, inhabit a world of magic and eccentric spirits. But Isabel Allende differs from García Márquez: she writes a feminocentric saga of free-spirited women who not only play the piano with the cover closed or make objects levitate, but also participate openly in the fight against tyranny and repression...With this book Isabel Allende joins the many spirited women who have chosen to speak for the voiceless and have had the courage to denounce the wrongdoings of their countries. She has written this novel so that all of us can remember the story of a country like Chile which had a freely elected government that was never given a chance to rule. (And there are parallels between the experience of Chile and that of other Latin American nations such as Nicaragua and El Salvador.) The House of the Spirits reclaims Chile's right to exist on its own terms. Allende writes this story because she does not want the humane and generous Chile to be forgotten. The House of the Spirits, then, is not only Chile but a metaphor for a besieged Latin America."

"Waffen kann man nicht mit Küssen und Kugeln nicht mit Blumen besiegen."

"Für die einen wird Pinochet immer ein brutaler Diktator sein, die anderen feiern ihn als Retter des Vaterlandes. Es wird hundert Jahre dauern, bis wir Chilenen uns über seine Rolle einig werden."

"Die meisten Hochglanzmagazine machen Frauen nicht selbstbewusst, sondern halten an dem Gedanken fest, es sei das größte Ziel, für Männer begehrenswert zu sein."