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)
Humor is a way of surviving.
Every good story needs a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Solitude is the soul's paradise.
The truth is that she was not a good mother, but she was a wonderful grandmother.
Literature is a kind of absolute truth.
The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.
The world would be a better place if people were more like children.
No matter what, nobody can take away the dances you've already danced.
The only thing that matters is love. Everything else is just a distraction.
He understood then that the world was not a place to be conquered, but a place to be loved.
It was the time when they invented the word 'love' and nobody knew what it meant.
Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the anguish of his dying was not from fear of death but of not being able to love anymore.
The heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.
The only thing that matters is to tell a good story.
He knew that he would never be able to love anyone as much as he loved her, and that was why he would never be able to love anyone else.
The only thing that matters is to be happy.
The problem of the writer is not to write, but to write well.
I write so that my friends will love me.
Literature is a game, a very serious game, but a game nonetheless.
The only thing that matters is life, and that life is in the books.
Contemporaries of Gabriel García Márquez
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014).