Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Art of Fiction No. 69 (1981)

Loved this quote:

"One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago."

He says writing the first paragraph is the most difficult part of writing a novel, and that he would take as much as several hours to write a single paragraph back then. Yet, he effortlessly comes up with sentences that could very well be the beginning of ridiculously beaultiful stories, such as:

"It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination."