Quote of the Day (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, on Life and Memory)

“Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.”—Colombian Nobel Literature laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1928-2014), Living to Tell the Tale: An Autobiography, translated by Edith Grossman (2003)

Quote of the Day (Jorge Luis Borges, on Events as a Writer’s ‘Clay’)

“A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one's art. One must accept it.”—Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet, translator and librarian Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Seven Nights, translated by Eliot Weinberger (1977)

Quote of the Day (Mario Vargas Llosa, on the Decline in Cultural Heroes)

“Chefs and fashion designers now enjoy the prominence that before was given to scientists.”— Nobel Literature Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society (2015)

Quote of the Day (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, With One of the Great Sentences I’ve Read)

“The house was far from everything, in the heart of the desert, next to a settlement with miserable, burning streets where the goats committed suicide from desolation when the winds of misfortune blew.”—Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother," Esquire, June 1973

Quote of the Day (Jorge Luis Borges, on Reading Bad Books)

“I have always advised my students: If a book bores you, leave it; don't read it because it is famous, don't read because it is modern, don’t read a book because it is old.  . . . If a book is tedious to you, don’t read it; that book was not written for you.”—Jorge Luis Borges, Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature, edited by Martin Arias and Martni Hadis (2013)

Quote of the Day (Carlos Fuentes, on How Language Is Shared)

“Language is a shared and sharing part of culture that cares little about formal classifications and much about vitality and connection, for culture itself perishes in purity or isolation, which is the deadly wages of perfection. Like bread and love, language is shared with others. And human beings share a tradition. There is no creation without tradition. No one creates from nothing.”—Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012), “How I Started to Write,” in Myself With Others:Selected Essays (1990)