I must try and break through the cliches about Latin America. Superpowers and other outsiders have fought over us for centuries in ways that have nothing to do with our problems. In reality we are all alone.
Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft – not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.
The most important thing Paris gave me was a perspective on Latin America. It taught me the differences between Latin America and Europe and among the Latin American countries themselves through the Latins I met there.
Injections are the best thing ever invented for feeding doctors.
Fame is very agreeable, but the bad thing is that it goes on 24 hours a day.
Everything that goes into my mouth seems to make me fat, everything that comes out of my mouth embarrasses me.
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 believe in God, but I’m afraid of Him.
This was his world, he said to himself, the sad, oppressive world that God had provided for him, and he was responsible to it.
Dr Urbino did not agree: in his opinion a Liberal president was exactly the same as a Conservative president, but not as well dressed.
There was no sleeper more elegant than she, with her curved body posed for a dance and her hand across her forehead, but there was also no one more ferocious when anyone disturbed the sensuality of her thinking she was still asleep when she no longer was.
He always considered death an unavoidable professional hazard.
Jose Palacios, his oldest servant, found him floating naked with his eyes open in the purifying waters of his bath and thought he had drowned.
The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.
Then he knew that they had rounded the cape of good hope, and he took her large, soft hand again and covered it with forlorn little kisses, first the hard metacarpus, the long, discerning fingers, the diaphanous nails, and then the hieroglyphics of her destiny on her perspiring palm.
No matter what you do this year or in the next hundred, you will be dead forever.
Just as real events are forgotten, some that never were can be in our memories as if they happened.
I never had intimate friends, and the few who came close are in New York. By which I mean they’re dead, because that’s where I suppose condemned souls go in order not to endure the truth of their past lives.
Morality, too, is a question of time.
It was, at last, real life, with my heart safe and condemned to die of happy love in the joyful agony of any day after my hundredth birthday.