Quotes from Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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.

It was foreseen that 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 forevermore, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.

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.

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.

A person doesn't die when he should but when he can.

Necessity has the face of a dog.

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 heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.

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

my heart has more rooms in it than a whore house

Then he made one last effort to search in his heart for the place where his affection had rotted away, and he could not find it.

A true friend is the one who holds your hand and touches your heart

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.

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

Just because someone does not love you as you want, it does not mean that you do not love with all his being.

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.

To all, I would say how mistaken they are when they think that they stop falling in love when they grow old, without knowing that they grow old when they stop falling in love.

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

A famous writer who wants to continue writing has to be constantly defending himself against fame.

The war is in the mountains," he said. "For as long as I can remember, they have killed us in the cities with decrees, not with bullets.

The worst way to miss someone is to have them sitting right next to you and know you can never have them.

The most important thing in marriage is not happiness, but stability.

While a person does not give up on sex, sex does not give up on the person.

The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good; and thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burdens of the past.