Give me a prejudice and I will move the world.

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

If you lie down in a village square hoping to capture a sea gull, you could stay there your whole life without succeeding. But a hundred miles from shore it's different. Sea gulls have a highly developed instinct for self-preservation on land but at sea they're very cocky.

A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.

He sank into the rocking chair, the same one in which Rebecca had sat during the early days of the house to give embroidery lessons, and in which Amaranta had played Chinese checkers with Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, and in which Amarana Ursula had sewn the tiny clothing for the child, and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past.

All my life, I've been frightened at the moment I sit down to write.

Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.