Gabriel García Márquez

Who is Gabriel García Márquez?

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature, and is the earliest living recipient. He pursued a self-directed education that resulted in his leaving law school for a career in journalism. From early on, he showed no inhibitions in his criticism of Colombian and foreign politics. In 1958, he married Mercedes Barcha; they have two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.

He started as a journalist, and has written many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best known for his novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude, Autumn of the Patriarch and Love in the Time of Cholera. His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing a literary style labeled as magic realism, which uses magical elements and events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situations. Some of his works are set in a fictional village called Macondo, and most of them express the theme of solitude.

Famous Quotes:

• Injections are the best thing ever invented for feeding doctors.
• Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.
• She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.
• A person doesn't die when he should but when he can.
• The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.
• He who awaits much can expect little.
• The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.
• Necessity has the face of a dog.
• No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.
• A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.