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  • The Paris Review

    How I Began to Write

    by Gabriel García Márquez Mar 06, 2019 6 minutes

    Gabriel García Márquez delivered the following speech at the Athenaeum of Caracas, in Venezuela, on May 3, 1970.

    Gabriel García Márquez. Photo: Patrick Curry.

    First of all, forgive me for speaking to you seated, but the truth is that if I stand, I run the risk of collapsing with fear. Really. I always thought I was fated to spend the most terrible five minutes of my life on a plane, before twenty or thirty people, and not like this, before two hundred friends. Fortunately, what is happening to me right now allows me to begin to speak about my literature, since I was thinking that I began to be a writer in the same way I climbed up on this platform: I was coerced. I confess I did all I could not to attend this assembly: I tried to get sick, I attempted to catch pneumonia, I went to the barber, hoping he’d slit my throat, and, finally, it occurred to me to come here without a jacket and tie so

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