Last week, on March 6, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the beloved author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and other works of magic realism, would have celebrated his 91st birthday (he passed away in 2014). I’ve gathered some of his words of wisdom for us:

“The heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.”

“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”

“He who awaits much can expect little.”

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

“Life is not what one lived, but rather what one remembers, and how it is remembered to tell the tale.”

“The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.”

“Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.”

“No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.”

 “From the moment I wrote ‘Leaf Storm,’ I realized I wanted to be a writer and that no one could stop me and that the only thing left for me to do was to try to be the best writer in the world.”

 “In journalism, just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That’s the only difference and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.”

“Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom. Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything, but the alpha and omega. An end in itself.”

“The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.”

“I don’t know who said that novelists read the novels of others only to figure out how they are written. I believe it’s true. We aren’t satisfied with the secrets exposed on the surface of the page; we turn the book around to find the seams.”

“Tricks you need to transform something which appears fantastic, unbelievable into something plausible, credible, those I learned from journalism. The key is to tell it straitght. It is done by reporters and by country folk.”

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

“Be calm. God awaits you at the door.”

Inspired and enlivened by this master of make-believe, let’s all write on!