Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Novelist

1927-03-06 – 2014-04-17

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a Colombian novelist, journalist, and Nobel laureate associated with magical realism. He is best known for One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. His fiction and nonfiction significantly shaped modern world literature.

Quotes by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.
Read quote
An early-rising man is a good spouse but a bad husband.
Read quote
Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.
Read quote
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.
Read quote
Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry.
Read quote
Tricks you need to transform something which appears fantastic, unbelievable into something plausible, credible, those I learned from journalism. The key is to tell it straight. It is done by reporters and by country folk.
Read quote
The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.
Read quote
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.
Read quote
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.
Read quote
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.
Read quote
If you lie down in a village square hoping to capture a sea gull, you could stay there your whole life without succeeding. But a hundred miles from shore it's different. Sea gulls have a highly developed instinct for self-preservation on land but at sea they're very cocky.
Read quote
Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
Read quote
He who expects much can expect little.
Read quote
After seven days at sea, thirst is a feeling unto itself; it's a deep pain in the throat, in the sternum, and especially beneath the clavicles. And it's also the fear of suffocating.
Read quote
Your first realization when you become an important person is that all day and all night, whatever the circumstances, people want to hear you talk about yourself.
Read quote
A famous writer who wants to continue writing has to be constantly defending himself against fame.
Read quote
Unfortunately many young writers are more concerned with fame than with their own work .... It's much more important to write than to be written about.
Read quote
I do not believe in God, but I am afraid of him.
Read quote
When you have a healthy appetite there is no such thing as bad bread.
Read quote
Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia.
Read quote