Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.”

“The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.”

“Everything that goes into my mouth seems to make me fat, everything that comes out of my mouth embarrasses me.”

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”

“An early-rising man is a good spouse but a bad husband.”

“Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.”

“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.”

“Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.”

“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.”

“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry.”

“In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That's the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.”

“I think that the idea that I'm writing for many more people than I ever imagined has created a certain general responsibility that is literary and political. There's even pride involved, in not wanting to fall short of what I did before.”

“The truth is that I know very few novelists who have been satisfied with the adaptation of their books for the screen.”

“I don't know who said that novelists read the novels of others only to figure out how they are written. I believe it's true. We aren't satisfied with the secrets exposed on the surface of the page: we turn the book around to find the seams.”

“If God hadn't rested on Sunday, He would have had time to finish the world.”

“People spend a lifetime thinking about how they would really like to live. I asked my friends and no one seems to know very clearly. To me it's very clear now. I wish my life could have been like the years when I was writing 'Love in the Time of Cholera.'”

“The most important thing Paris gave me was a perspective on Latin America. It taught me the differences between Latin America and Europe and among the Latin American countries themselves through the Latins I met there.”