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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“There is always something left to love.”

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

“The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.”

“Wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.”

“No matter what, nobody can take away the dances you’ve already had.”

“He who awaits much can expect little.”

“To oppression… we respond with life.”

“Life is the best thing that has ever been invented.”

“[Y]ou can’t be a writer without having tricks. What’s important is the legitimacy of those tricks, up to what point they’re used and to what degree.”

“To be a good writer you have to be absolutely lucid at every moment of writing, and in good health. I’m very much against the romantic concept of writing which maintains that the act of writing is a sacrifice, and that the worse the economic conditions or the emotional state, the better the writing. I think you have to be in a very good emotional and physical state. Literary creation for me requires good health, and the Lost Generation understood this. They were people who loved life.”

“The only possible advice is to keep on writing, to continue and continue to write.”