Quotes

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."                   From The Paris Review Interviews, Gabriel García Márquez, The Art of Fiction No. 69

All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.”

Gabriel García Márquez: a Life (Biography)

Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale."

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

Love in the Time of Cholera

The secret of good old-age is none other than an honest pact with solitude."

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love."

Memories of My Melancholy Whores

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

He recognised her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: 'Only God knows how much I loved you.'"

Love in the Time of Cholera

I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love.”

Memories of My Melancholy Whores

My heart has more rooms in it than a whore house.”

Love in the Time of Cholera

But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about."

Love in the Time of Cholera

The problem in public life is learning to overcome terror; the problem in married life is learning to overcome boredom."

Love in the Time of Cholera

I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of Him."

Love in the Time of Cholera

He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians."

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Direct quotes

• Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry.
• What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.
• A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.
• 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.
• No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.
• The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.
• The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.
• An early-rising man is a good spouse but a bad husband.
• Everything that goes into my mouth seems to make me fat, everything that comes out of my mouth embarrasses me.
• If God hadn't rested on Sunday, He would have had time to finish the world.
• Fame is very agreeable, but the bad thing is that it goes on 24 hours a day.
• 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.'
• Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.
• A person doesn't die when he should but when he can.
• He who awaits much can expect little.
• Injections are the best thing ever invented for feeding doctors.
• 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.
• Necessity has the face of a dog

Journalist, novelist and screen-writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, dies at 87

Also known as Gabo, Gabriel Jose Garcia (father’s side) Marquez (mother’s side) was born in Aracataca, Colombia, on 6 March 1927. He was the first-born of his parents, who had eleven children. He studied at the University of Bogota (capital of Colombia) and University of Catagena. Married to Mercedes, he has two sons. It was in 1946 that he wrote his first book, but his first novel came some ten years later, in 1957. One Hundred Years of Solitude, his defining work as far as the Western world was concerned, was published when he was 40.

Professional assignments took him to Rome, Paris and Venezuela. Marquez established the bureau of Prensa Latina (Cuban Press Agency) in Bogota. Working for the same agency, he moved to New York. More moves were on the cards: Spain, Mexico and then Colombia, where he was invited by the President, in 1982.

Over the years, Gabriel, became a close friend of Cuba’s dictator Fidel Castro, based on shared vacations, a part-time career promoting Havana as a movie-industry capital. He also defended the Castro dictatorship against its opponents in the Hispanic literary world.

He bagged the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. In his acceptance speech, he said, “Latin America is a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable."

When he was 70, Garcia Marquez fulfilled his lifelong dream, buying a majority interest in the Colombian newsmagazine, Cambio, and for the next 10 years, he contributed regularly to the magazine. "I'm a journalist. I've always been a journalist," he told the AP at the time. "My books couldn't have been written if I weren't a journalist because all the material was taken from reality."

In Gabriel’s 2008 biography, author Gerald Martin tells us about a real-life 'Dead Man's House', the property of a neighbour of the García Márquez family 'who went on living there after hanging himself and could clearly be heard coughing and whistling inside'. On the day Gabo's baby brother was christened, 'a local trumpeter had his throat slit at the very moment he was straining to blow the highest, wildest note'.

Although Martin could not have predicted how much longer Gabriel would live, he was in a hurry to get Gabriel Garcia Marquez-A Life published. He had spent 17 years studying García Márquez, and had written more than 2,000 pages about him, with 6,000 footnotes, when it dawned on him that Gabo might die before he could read it. Not only that: “I realised that perhaps I would never finish the project.” Luckily he did, a good six years before the literary titan left his earthly incarnation.

In the last few years, he lived in Spain and Mexico City, and death came in Mexico City.

Marquez and Cinema

Writer Credits

2011

Memoria de mis putas tristes

2011

Lecciones para un beso

2011

Nativ Damech Basheleg

2009

Of Love and Other Demons

2009

Dead Man's Coughing

2007

Love in the Time of Cholera

2006

ZA 05. Lo viejo y lo nuevo

2004

In Evil Hour

2001

The Invisible Children

2001

Duelo (Short Film)

1999

No One Writes to the Colonel

1996

Oedipo alcalde

1996

Ma armastan sind (Short Film)

1994

Eyes of a Blue Dog

1993

Xuese Qingchen

1993

Crónicas de una generación trágica (TV Show)

1992

Mkholod sikvdili modis autsileblad

1992

Saturday Night Thief (TV Show)

1992

Me alquilo para soñar (TV Show)

1992

Nekros adelfos (Short Film)

1991

La mujer que llegaba a las seis (Short Film)

1991

Contigo en la distancia (Short Film)

1991

La María (TV Show)

1990

The Two Way Mirror (TV Show)

1989

Cartas del parque

1988

Milagro en Roma

1988

A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

1988

Fábula de la Bella Palomera

1988

I'm the One You're Looking For (TV Movie)

1988

The Summer of Mrs. Forbes (TV Movie)

1988

Un domingo feliz (TV Movie)

1987

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

1986

Tiempo de morir

1984

Farewell to the Ark

1983

Eréndira

1981

Enroque

1981

El mar del tiempo perdido

1981

Hyakunen no kodoku

1979

María de mi corazón

1979

La viuda de Montiel

1979

El año de la peste

1975

Presage

1969

Patsy, mi amor

1968

4 contra el crimen

1967

Juego peligroso

1966

Time to Die

1965

There Are No Thieves in This Village

1965

Amor amor amor

1965

Lola de mi vida

1964

The Golden Cockerel

1954

La langosta azul (Short Film, also directed)

Acting Credits

2012

On Story

1990

My Macondo

1979

María de mi corazón

1965

There Are No Thieves in This Village

Boletero cine