Gabriel García Márquez
42 quotes
Biography
Gabriel José García Márquez was a Colombian writer and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo or Gabito throughout Latin America. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, particularly in the Spanish language, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.
"What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it."
"sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love"
"It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams."
"nothing in this world was more difficult than love."
"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 give birth to themselves."
"The world must be all fucked up,"he said then, "when men travel first class and literature goes as freight."
"The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast."
"Don't let yourself die without knowing the wonder of fucking with love."
"Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.."
"Always tell what you feel. Do what you think..."
"Never stop smiling not even when you're sad, someone might fall in love with your smile."
"I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love."
"My God, if I had a heart, I would write my hate on ice, and wait for the sun to show."
"If God hadn't rested on Sunday, He would have had time to finish the world."
"Un buen escritor se aprecia mejor por lo que rompe que por lo que publica."
"and realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as he had always believed, but an immediate reality."
"...a lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth ..."
"Santiago Nasar had often told me that the smell of closed-in flowers had an immediate relation to death for him."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry."
"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."
"A famous writer who wants to continue writing has to be constantly defending himself against fame. I don't really like to say this because it never sounds sincere, but I would really have liked for my books to have been published after my death, so I wouldn't have to go through all this business of fame and being a great writer. In my case, the only advantage to fame is that I have been able to give it a political use. Otherwise, it is quite uncomfortable. The problem is that you're famous for twenty-four hours a day, and you can't say, "Okay, I won't be famous until tomorrow," or press a button and say, "I won't be famous here or now.""
"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."