This is the extent of his knowledge of the sea: it was very big, it was salty, and fish lived there.

A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side.

If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets.

This is what it means to live on. When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to life. It is impossible to live without hope.

All things in my novels are real for me. Some western critics said that Garcia Marquez's novels are magic realism. However, I believe that Marquez must have experienced everything in his novels.

I tell lies sometimes. The last time I lied was a year ago. I absolutely detest lying. You could say that lying and silence are the two greatest sins of present day society. Actually, I lie a lot, and I'm always clamming up.

Inside him, twenty years dissolved and mixed into one complex, swirling whole. Everything that had accumulated over the years-- all he had seen, all the words he has spoken, all the values he had held-- all of it coalesced into one solid, thick pillar in his heart, the core of which was spinning like a potter's wheel. Wordlessly, Tengo observed the scene, as if watching the destruction and rebirth of a planet.