According to his brother, dementia is stealing the mind of Gabriel García Márquez, ending his ability to write. In a 1981 Paris Review interview, the author explains his process in rich detail. Given his current state, his thoughts here are particularly poignant:
One thing that Hemingway wrote that greatly impressed me was that writing for him was like boxing. He took care of his health and his well-being. Faulkner had a reputation of being a drunkard, but in every interview that he gave he said that it was impossible to write one line when drunk. Hemingway said this too. Bad readers have asked me if I was drugged when I wrote some of my works. But that illustrates that they don’t know anything about literature or drugs. To be a good writer you have to be absolutely lucid at every moment of writing, and in good health. I’m very much against the romantic concept of writing which maintains that the act of writing is a sacrifice, and that the worse the economic conditions or the emotional state, the better the writing. I think you have to be in a very good emotional and physical state. Literary creation for me requires good health, and the Lost Generation understood this. They were people who loved life.
(Photo: Literature Nobel Price Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez takes part in the Chair Julio Cortazar of the University of Guadalajara in Guadalajara Mexico, 23 November 2007. By Ivan Garcia/AFP/Getty Images.)
The Dish 