Isabel Allende

I'm interested in people who have to overcome obstacles, people who are not sheltered by the umbrella of the establishment, marginals.

In 2011, I announced that I was going to retire, and my agent panicked. So she says: 'No, no, no. You have to write a book with your husband.' My husband is a writer of crime novels. His name is William Gordon. And so I had to accommodate to his style because that's what he writes. So we decided we'd give it a try. Well, we almost divorced.

I can promise you that women working together - linked, informed and educated - can bring peace and prosperity to this forsaken planet.

I am happier when I love than when I am loved. I adore my husband, my son, my grandchildren, my mother, my dog, and frankly, I don't know if they even like me. But who cares? Loving them is my joy.

The fact that you own a gun and shoot to defend your life is a very American way of thinking.

Americans have a warrior's mentality, most of them. That's how this society was built. The fact that you own a gun and shoot to defend your life is a very American way of thinking.

My life is about ups and downs, great joys and great losses.

All summer, I read fiction because you must read for the pleasure and beauty of it, and not only for research. I don't read thrillers, romance or mystery, and I don't read self-help books because I don't believe in shortcuts and loopholes.

I have not changed; I am still the same girl I was fifty years ago and the same young woman I was in the seventies. I still lust for life, I am still ferociously independent, I still crave justice, and I fall madly in love easily.

In the books I have written, I have created in my mind a universe. My kids say I have a village in my head and I live in that village, and it's true. When I start writing a book, characters from previous books reappear. All my emotions, my mind, my heart, my dreams, everything becomes connected with a new book, and nothing else really matters.

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.

My father left when I was three, and I have no memory of him. The most significant male figures in my life were my grandfather, in whose house I lived during the first 10 years of my childhood, and later my stepfather.