“It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay. It was an intricate stew of truths and mirages that convulsed the ghost of José Arcadio Buendía with impatience and made him wander all through the house even in broad daylight.” From One Hundred Years of Solitude
“To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else’s heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.” From Love in the Time of Cholera.
” He dreamed that a black mule with gold teeth had come inside and gone through the house from the principal reception room to the pantries, eating without haste everything in its path while the family and slaves were taking their siestas, until at last it had eaten the curtains, the rugs, the lamps, the vases, the table service and the linen in the dining room, the saints in the altars, the wardrobes and chests with all their contents, the pots in the kitchens, the doors and the windows with their hinges and bolts, and all the furniture from the portico to the bedrooms, and the only thing left intact was the oval of his mother’s dressing table mirror, floating in its own space.” From The General in His Labyrinth.
“…because of the affinities of all kinds that I found between the cultures of the Deep South and the Caribbean, with which I have an absolute, essential, and irreplaceable identification in my formation as a human being and as a writer. After I became aware of this, I began to read like a real working novelist, not only for pleasure but out of an insatiable curiosity to discover how books by wise people were written.” From Living To Tell the Tale.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a Colombian writer. He is best known for his novels. He was one of the developers and chief proponents of a literary style called magic realism, which combines magical and sometimes supernatural elements into a very realistically constructed story. Garcia Marquez uses humor as a stylistic tool in all of his works, sometimes in surprising ways. Another technique is to leave out seemingly important information to make the reader use his or her imagination.
In discussing his own style in a New York Times interview (2/21/1988) Garcia Marquez told Marlise Simons:
“In every book I try to take a different path… One doesn’t choose the style. You can investigate and try to discover what the best style would be for a theme. But the style is determined by the subject, by the mood of the times. If you try to use something that is not suitable, it just won’t work…I only respond to our way of life, the life of the Caribbean.”
Garcia Marquez received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.