Gabriel García Márquez
Master of magical realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Most quoted
"I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind, but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature."
— from Living to Tell the Tale, 2002
"The only thing that came to her in that moment was the memory of the afternoon when her father had read the piece about the siege to her, and she was shocked that she could remember it with so many details when she could not remember what she had done the previous week."
— from Love in the Time of Cholera, 1985
"Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but ... life obliges them over and over again to relinquish themselves to an exit as painful and dramatic as the one that obliged them to emerge for the first time."
— from Love in the Time of Cholera, 1986
All quotes by Gabriel García Márquez (267)
I believe that the purpose of literature is to make us more human.
The most important thing in life is to be true to yourself.
The only difference between a madman and me is that I am not mad.
It's not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.
The world must be all of one piece, because if it were two, it would have been broken already.
He had the rare virtue of being in the right place at the right time, and the even rarer virtue of knowing it.
The first condition for being a good writer is to be a good reader.
The only thing that matters is love, and that is what I have been trying to tell you all along.
It was the time when they were still young enough to believe that the past could be erased with a stroke of the pen.
It is not possible to love and be wise.
The only thing that could console him for the loss of his youth was the certainty that he had never been young.
The only way to be happy is to be in love, and the only way to be in love is to be happy.
He had lost his youth, but he had gained a certain wisdom, which was almost as good.
The world is a place where everything is possible, except what is impossible.
The only thing that matters is to live, and to live is to love.
The only thing that can save us from reality is illusion.
The only thing that matters is to be happy, and to be happy is to be in love.
The only thing that can save us from ourselves is love.
The problem with eternity is that it's too long.
The only thing that matters is to live, and to live is to remember.
Contemporaries of Gabriel García Márquez
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014).