Gabriel García Márquez

"There are no two men in this world more similar than you and him," she told me. "And that's the worst thing for having a conversation."

2002

Before adolescence, memory is more interested in the future than the past...

2002

Nostalgia, as always, had wiped away bad memories and magnified the good ones.

2002

It was impossible to conceive of two creatures so different who got along so well and loved each other so much.

2002

Since the appearance of visible life on Earth, 380 million years had to elapse in order for a butterfly to learn how to fly; 180 million years to create a rose with no other commitment than to be beautiful; and four geological eras in order for us human beings to be able to sing better than birds, and to be able to die from love. It is not honorable for the human talent, in the golden age of science, to have conceived the way for such an ancient and colossal process to return to the nothingness from which it came through the simple act of pushing a button.

Speaking of nuclear weapons in “The Cataclysm of Damocles” on the anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, on August 6, 1986 (in Spanish), 1986

The most prosperous countries have succeeded in accumulating powers of destruction such as to annihilate, a hundred times over, not only all the human beings that have existed to this day, but also the totality of all living beings that have ever drawn breath on this planet of misfortune. On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said, "I decline to accept the end of man." I would fall unworthy of standing in this place that was his, if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possiblity. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.

Nobel lecture (8 December 1982, archived), 1982

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry.

p. 325, 1981

I was asked the other day if I would be interested in the Nobel Prize, but I think that for me it would be an absolute catastrophe. I would certainly be interested in deserving it, but to receive it would be terrible. It would just complicate even more the problems of fame. The only thing I really regret in life is not having a daughter.

p. 339, 1981

I would like for my books to have been recognized posthumously, at least in capitalist countries, where they turn you into a kind of merchandise.

p. 336, 1981

It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.

p. 322, 1981

Interviewer: You describe seemingly fantastic events in such minute detail that it gives them their own reality. Is this something you have picked up from journalism? García Márquez: That's a journalistic trick which you can also apply to literature. If you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants in the sky, people will probably believe you.

p. 324, 1981

Santiago Nasar had often told me that the smell of closed-in flowers had an immediate relation to death for him.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), trans. Gregory Rabassa [Ballantine, 1984, ], p. 47, 1981

I can't think of any one film that improved on a good novel, but I can think of many good films that came from very bad novels.

p. 338, 1981

In the end all books are written for your friends. The problem after writing One Hundred Years of Solitude was that now I no longer know whom of the millions of readers I am writing for; this upsets and inhibits me. It's like a million eyes are looking at you and you don't really know what they think.

p. 322, 1981

...a lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth ...

translated from El Ontoño del Patriarica (1975) by Gregory Rabassa, 1975