Quote of the Day

Although Gabriel García Márquez passed in 2014, we are fortunate to still have his words and works with us. Winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature, he was named “the greatest Colombian who ever lived” by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning and current President of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos.

While writing my previous post, I thought about the notion of commitment in a far-ranging way, and while Márquez is probably most famous internationally for his novels One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, he was also a respected journalist who knew a thing or two about the trade.

This quote of his below not only sums up one of the big problems with today’s presidential election in the U.S., but is solid advice to heed for fiction writers.

“In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That’s the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it”