We have to find meters whose scales are unknown in the world... Fuentes once imitated the snarling-hissing ghost cats he had heard in the air over Kafka's grave in Prague....

The road was hard
The first royalties that allowed me to live on my stories and novels were paid to me when I was in my forties, after I had published four books with the most abject earnings. Before that, my life was always agitated by a tangle of tricks, feints, and illusions intended to outwit the countless lures that tried to turn me into anything but a writer.
He was a young, vital man, and he did his full share of drinking, whoring and carousing, all of which he recalls now with no small wonder that he managed to survive.
· García Márquez [WashingtonPost]