'It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality.' The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.

"Santiago Nasar had often told me that the smell of closed-in flowers had an immediate relation to death for him."

"In the end all books are written for your friends. The problem after writing One Hundred Years of Solitude was that now I no longer know whom of the millions of readers I am writing for; this upsets and inhibits me. It's like a million eyes are looking at you and you don't really know what they think."