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)
Fame is a form of incomprehension, perhaps the worst.
I have always been convinced that my true profession is that of a writer.
The world must be all fucked up when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.
All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.
Don't let yourself die without knowing the wonder of fucking.
The world is divided into those who screw and those who do not. He distrusted those who did not.
A lie is the most sacred thing there is.
Power is a poison that corrupts everyone who touches it.
I discovered that everything was a matter of the smallest detail.
The only thing I know about literature is that it is a dangerous profession.
In Mexico, we have a saying: 'Life is not what happens to you, but what you do with what happens to you.'
I am a writer obsessed with reality.
Love is the only thing that can make life worth living.
The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.
Age isn't how old you are but how old you feel.
Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.
The essence of a government is to be found in its tolerance.
I write because I cannot stop writing.
Death does not take away the dignity of life.
The best way to measure the loss of a book is by the space it leaves behind.
Contemporaries of Gabriel García Márquez
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014).