For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood.
He did not dare to console her, knowing that it would have been like consoling a tiger run thru by a spear.
What Uncle Leo XIII never suspected was that his nephew’s courage did not come from the need to survive or from a brute indifference inherited from his father, but from a driving need for love, which no obstacle in this world or the next would ever break.
It was a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her head like nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them.
Over the years they both reached the same wise conclusion by different paths: it was not possible to live together in any other way, or love in any other way, and nothing in this world was more difficult than love.
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 straight. It is done by reporters and by country folk.
I think that the idea that I’m writing for many more people than I ever imagined has created a certain general responsibility that is literary and political. There’s even pride involved, in not wanting to fall short of what I did before.
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.
The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.