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

What is essential, therefore, is not that you no longer believe, but that God continues to believe in you.

He was healthier than the rest of us, but when you listened with the stethoscope you could hear the tears bubbling inside his heart.

He was weary of the uncertainty of the vicious circle of that eternal war that always found him in the same place, but always older, wearier, even more in the position of not knowing why, or how, or even when.

She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity.

I must try and break through the cliches about Latin America. Superpowers and other outsiders have fought over us for centuries in ways that have nothing to do with our problems. In reality we are all alone.

She searched the truth with an anguish almost as great as her terrible fear of finding it .