
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Art of Fiction No. 69 (1981) - dang
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3196/the-art-of-fiction-no-69-gabriel-garcia-marquez
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abe_duarte
Loved this quote:

"One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went
back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis.
The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first
line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found
himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the
line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things
like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago."

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r4pha
He says writing the first paragraph is the most difficult part of writing a
novel, and that he would take as much as several hours to write a single
paragraph back then. Yet, he effortlessly comes up with sentences that could
very well be the beginning of ridiculously beaultiful stories, such as:

"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."

