Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez (1927–14) was a Colombian novelist and short-story writer and polemical journalist who won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.
García Márquez is regarded as one of the founding figures of modern South American literature. His One Hundred Years of Solitude is the best-known work by any Latin American author; its success prompted a worldwide explosion of interest in Latin American writing and culture.
Born in a small town near the northern coast of Colombia, García Márquez was raised by his grandparents. His grandmother’s manner of telling ghost stories, folk tales, and supernatural legends would later influence his writing. He began working as a journalist while studying law in Bogotá; he then worked as a foreign correspondent in Europe.
García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) achieved a unique combination of realism, lyricism, and mythical fantasy, making it a central text of “magic realism.” This popular novel traces the history of a fictional village from its founding to its decline and destruction a century later by a hurricane, interweaved with the misfortunes of a family over seven generations. The novel was an instant bestseller, with the first edition of 8,000 copies selling out within a week of its publication.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is a landmark in literary theory and history. García Márquez’s later works include The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975,) an elaborate satire on South American corruption and totalitarianism, Love in the Time of Cholera (1985,) and The General in his Labyrinth (1989.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez
An early-rising man… a good spouse but a bad husband.
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Topics: Husbands, Marriage
The most important thing in marriage is not happiness, but stability.
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Topics: Realistic Expectations
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.
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Topics: The Past, Memory
It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Topics: 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.
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Topics: Children
Injections are the best thing ever invented for feeding doctors.
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Topics: Medicine, Science
The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Topics: Marriage
No medicine cures what happiness cannot.
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Topics: Reality
Necessity has the face of a dog.
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Topics: Necessity
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.
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writing, Writers
A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Topics: Father, Family, Fathers, Aging
He who awaits much can expect little.
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Topics: Procrastination, Expectations
A person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Topics: Death, Dying
I am not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Topics: Wealth, Money, Riches
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