Isabel Allende

My mother didn't want me to be a feminist, a radical, political person, because she was scared. She wanted me to be protected and safe, but my life never was.

Everything I write has to be connected to my life. One of the things that always comes up in my writing is the search for freedom, especially in women.

I have been a foreigner all my life, first as a daughter of diplomats, then as a political refugee and now as an immigrant in the U.S. I have had to leave everything behind and start anew several times, and I have lost most of my extended family.

I have a foot here and a foot in some spirit world. There are many more layers to reality, and that permeates my life and my writing in a very natural way. I don't even think about it.

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.

I was a political refugee living in Venezuela. I had a job that was twelve hours a day, no money. It was a hard time.

The longest, most solid and complex relationship in my life is with my mother. It started before I was born, and now, when I am 71 and living in California and she is 92 and living in Chile, we are still in touch daily.

Every life of a character is within a context. If I write detached from a social and political background, my story looks like a soap opera where everybody is indoors, not working and living off their emotions.

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.

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.

I rebelled against all form of authority, against my grandfather, my step-father, the Church, the police, the government, the bosses. Everything male that was there, and was determining my life.

I never thought that I would come to live in the United States. I was not pursuing the American dream.