Gabriel García Márquez Quotes

What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.[Lo que importa en la vida no es lo que te ocurre, sino qué recuerdas y cómo lo recuerdas.]

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry.

The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.[La interpretación de nuestra realidad con esquemas ajenos sólo contribuye a hacernos cada vez más desconocidos, cada vez menos libres, cada vez más solitarios.]

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.”

Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry.[Ninguna persona merece tus lagrimas, y quien se las merezca no te hará llorar.]

Life is the best thing that’s ever been invented.[La vida es la cosa mejor que se ha inventado.]

It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.[No es cierto que la gente deja de perseguir sus sueños porque envejecen, envejecen porque dejan de perseguir sus sueños.]

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.

In spite of this, to oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life.[Sin embargo, frente a la opresión, el saqueo y el abandono, nuestra respuesta es la vida.]

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.

If you wait for the big things, you can wait for the little ones.[Also known as:]He who awaits much can expect little.[El que espera lo mucho espera lo poco.]

If God had not rested on Sunday He would have had time to finish the world properly.[Si Dios no hubiera descansado el domingo, habría tenido tiempo de terminar el mundo.]