Amazing writers from around the globe, instead of trying to convince you why they’re worth a read, I’ll let them speak for themselves.
1)Gabriel GarcíaMárquez / Colombia
“Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but … life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
2) Haruki Murakami / Japan
“Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who’s in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It’s like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven’t seen in a long time.”
3) Paulo Coelho / Brazil
“When a person really desires something, all the universe conspires to help that person to realize his dream.”
4) Ismail Kadare / Albania
“If an animal has to be sacrificed when a new bridge is built, what will it take to build a whole new world?”
5) Wisława Szymborska / Poland
“Generally speaking, life is so rich and full of variety; you have to remember all the time that there is a comical side to everything.”
6) Imre Kertész / Hungary
“You just sit there and tolerate it, the same way everything in this country is tolerated. Every deception, every lie, every bullet in the brains. Just as you are already tolerating bullets in the brains that will be implemented only after the bullet is put in your brains.”
7) Naguib Mahfouz / Egypt
“You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.”
8) Federico García Lorca / Spain
“To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.”
9) Arundhati Roy / India
“…the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.
That is their mystery and their magic.”
10) Banana Yoshimoto / Japan
“Sometimes people put up walls, not to keep others out, but to see who cares enough to break them down.”