“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”
— Gabriel Garcia Marquez
This quote has been widely attributed to Garcia Marquez, reflecting his belief that imagination and ambition should never be surrendered to age or circumstance.
I grew up in Aracataca, a small town in Colombia where my grandparents raised me on stories of wars, ghosts, and miracles that were all equally true to them. My grandfather was a colonel who had fought in a civil war. My grandmother told me about the dead as casually as the living. I became a journalist because I could not afford to be a writer, and I became a writer because journalism could not hold everything I needed to say. I spent eighteen months writing One Hundred Years of Solitude in a room in Mexico City while my wife pawned everything we owned. When I finished, I did not have enough money to mail the manuscript.