Gabriel Garcia Marquez
novelist, short story writer, journalist, playwright, writer, publisher, poet lawyer, autobiographer, screenwriter, prose writer, opinion journalist, television writer, film screenwriter, film director, television actor
Read on Wikipedia1927 – 2014
All Quotes by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
“Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain.”
“Santiago Nasar had often told me that the smell of closed-in flowers had an immediate relation to death for him.”
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
“In the shattered schoolhouse where for the first time he had felt the security of power, a few feet from the room where he had come to know the uncertainty of love, Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous. Death really did not matter to him but life did and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia. He did not speak until they asked him for his last request.”
“She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.”
“A person fucks himself up so much," Colonel Aureliano Buendía said, "Fucks himself up so much just so that six weak fairies can kill him and he can't do anything about it.”
“Carmelita Montiel, a twenty-year-old virgin, had just bathed in orange-blossom water and was strewing rosemary leaves over Pilar Ternera's bed when the shot rang out. Aureliano Jose had been destined to find with her the happiness that Amaranta had denied him, to have seven children, and to die in her arms of old age, but the bullet that entered his chest had been directed by a wrong interpretation of the cards.”
“I must try and break through the cliches about Latin America. Superpowers and other outsiders have fought over us for centuries in ways that have nothing to do with our problems. In reality we are all alone.”
“A person doesn't die when he should but when he can.”
“"Shit!" she shouted. "Here," she said.”
“The anxiety of falling in love could not find repose except in bed.”
“The world was reduced to the surface of her skin and her inner self was safe from all bitterness.”
“One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship.”
“In that Macondo forgotten even by the birds, where the dust and the heat had become so strong that it was difficult to breathe, secluded by solitude and love and by the solitude of love in a house where it was almost impossible to sleep because of the noise of the red ants, Aureliano, and Amaranta Úrsula were the only happy beings, and the most happy on the face of the earth.”
“… the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”
“The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.”
“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.”
“Interviewer: You describe seemingly fantastic events in such minute detail that it gives them their own reality. Is this something you have picked up from journalism? García Márquez: That's a journalistic trick which you can also apply to literature. If you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants in the sky, people will probably believe you.”
“Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry.”
“and realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as he had always believed, but an immediate reality.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I was asked the other day if I would be interested in the Nobel Prize, but I think that for me it would be an absolute catastrophe. I would certainly be interested in deserving it, but to receive it would be terrible. It would just complicate even more the problems of fame. The only thing I really regret in life is not having a daughter.”
“Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.”
“Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.”
“Before adolescence, memory is more interested in the future than the past...”
“Nostalgia, as always, had wiped away bad memories and magnified the good ones.”
“Now you don't have to say yes because your heart is saying it for you.”
“Children's lies are signs of great talent.”
“But I believe without any doubt at all that our greatest good fortune was that even in the most extreme difficulties we might lose our patience but never our sense of humor.”
“It was impossible to conceive of two creatures so different who got along so well and loved each other so much.”
“From the time they turned one they were tossed from the balconies of the kitchens, first with life preserves so they would lose their fear of the water, and then without life preservers so they would lose their respect for death.”
“There are no two men in this world more similar than you and him," she told me. "And that's the worst thing for having a conversation.”
“… no sooner had you done something than someone else appeared who threatened to do it better.”
“… nothing was easy, least of all surviving Sunday afternoons without love.”
“… my unhealthy timidity might be a great obstacle to me in my life.”
“Because for you, quitting smoking would be like killing someone you love.”
“Until I discovered the miracle that all things that sound are music, including dishes and silverware in the dishwasher, as long as they fulfill the illusion of showing us where life is heading.”
“I couldn't tell you because even I don't know who I am yet.”
“… for an instant I thought about stopping the cab to say goodbye, but I preferred not to defy again a destiny as uncertain and persistent as mine.”
“Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft - not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.”
“I must try and break through the cliches about Latin America. Superpowers and other outsiders have fought over us for centuries in ways that have nothing to do with our problems. In reality we are all alone.”
“She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.”
“The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.”
“Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.”
“The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.”
“Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.”
“I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love.”
“A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.”
“The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.”
“I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of Him.”
“Melquiades had not put events in the order of man’s conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one instant.”
“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.”
“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”
“No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.”