- Books, Quotes, Reading, Writing

“A novelist can do anything he wants as long as he makes people believe in it.”

Happy birthday, Gabriel García Márquez! Here are some quotes from his writing.

“In spite of this, to oppression, plundering, and abandonment, we respond with life. Neither floods nor plagues, famines nor cataclysms, nor even the eternal wars of century upon century, have been able to subdue the persistent advantage of life over death.”

“Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.”

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

“The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.”

“No medicine cures what happiness cannot.”

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

“It’s much more important to write than to be written about.”“It’s much more important to write than to be written about.”

“I don’t believe in the romantic myth that a writer must be hungry and in a wreck in order to write.”

“If you’re going to be a writer, you have to be one of the great ones, and they don’t make them anymore. […] After all, there are better ways to starve to death.”

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John Madera's fiction may be found in Conjunctions, Opium Magazine, The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing, and many other journals. His criticism may be found in American Book Review, Bookforum, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Rain Taxi: Review of Books, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other venues. Recipient of an M.F.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University, John Madera lives in New York City, where he runs Rhizomatic and manages and edits Big Other.

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