After so many years of working like an animal, I feel overwhelmed by tiredness, without clear prospects, except in the only thing that I like but which doesn't feed me: the novel. My decision, which speaks to an overwhelming impulse, is to arrange things any way I have to in order to go on writing my stuff. Believe me, dramatic or not, I don't know what's going to happen ... What you've said about the first chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude has made me very happy. That's why I published it. When I got back from Columbia and read what I'd already written I suddenly had the demoralizing feeling that I was embarked on an adventure that could as easily be catastrophic as successful ... My conclusion from all of this is that when you have a topic that pursues you it starts growing in your head for a long and time and the day it explodes you have to sit down at a typewriter or run the risk of murdering your wife ...
Gabriel Garcia Marquez in a letter to Plinio Medoza, July 22, 1966 from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Life by Gerald Martin