A writer rejects his mother's advice

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 2009" by Festival Internacional de Cine en Guadalajara - Gala_Ianugural 022. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Before he became the celebrated author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez aspired to be a musician, and when his exasperated mother suggested writing become his vocation, he put up a fight, Maria Popova writes, quoting from his memoir: "'If you’re going to be a writer you have to be one of the great ones, and they don’t make them anymore,' I told my mother. 'After all, there are better ways to starve to death.'"

March 29, 2015

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