Gabriel García Márquez

Literature Colombian 1927 – 2014 267 quotes

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)

The search for love is a desperate act.

Love in the Time of Cholera 1985

The first condition for a writer is to have something to say.

Interview

A true friend is one who knows all about you and still loves you.

Attributed

The problem with reality is that it's too real.

Attributed

The only remedy for love is to love more.

Love in the Time of Cholera 1985

The writer's duty is to make the reader believe in the impossible.

Interview

There is no medicine that can cure what happiness cannot.

Love in the Time of Cholera 1985

The greatest victory of all is to live.

Attributed

The only thing that can save us from the absurd is the absurd itself.

Attributed

The only thing that matters is to live.

Love in the Time of Cholera 1985

The writer is a kind of God who creates a world.

Interview

The only thing that can save us from the absurd is the absurd.

Attributed

The only thing that matters is to love.

Love in the Time of Cholera 1985

The writer's task is to make the reader believe in the impossible.

Interview

The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.

One Hundred Years of Solitude 1967

A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.

One Hundred Years of Solitude 1967

He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.

One Hundred Years of Solitude 1967

Wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.

One Hundred Years of Solitude 1967

The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.

One Hundred Years of Solitude 1967

Sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love.

Love in the Time of Cholera 1985