I need to tell a story. It’s an obsession. Each story is a seed inside of me that starts to grow and grow, like a tumor, and I have to deal with it sooner or later. Why a particular story? I don’t know when I begin. That I learn much later. Over the years I’ve discovered that all the stories I’ve told, all the stories I will ever tell, are connected to me in some way.

Isabel Allende (b. 1942) Chilean-American writer

In Meredith Maran, ed., Why We Write, ch. 1 (2013)