Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez on life as literature
Gabriel García Márquez on life as literature
The recently deceased García Márquez, in an interview published in the winter 1981 issue of The Paris Review:
My mother asked me to accompany her to Aracataca, where I was born, and to sell the house where I spent my first years. When I got there it was at first quite shocking because I was now twenty-two and hadn’t been there since the age of eight. Nothing had really changed, but I felt that I wasn’t really looking at the village, but I was experiencing it as if I were reading it. It was as if everything I saw had already been written, and all I had to do was to sit down and copy what was already there and what I was just reading.
I have never read his work (a sin of literary omission I will soon remedy), but in this story García Márquez perfectly described a sensation I have at least once a week. It’s why I started writing fiction again recently after a long drought.
Go read the rest of the interview, it’s great.