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.

García Márquez is pushing back against the common assumption that “magical realism” is chiefly an exercise in invention. He insists that what readers label as fantasy is often a faithful transcription of lived experience—especially in the Caribbean/Latin American world he knew, where history, politics, superstition, violence, and exuberant storytelling collide in ways that can seem unbelievable to outsiders. The remark reframes his art as a kind of reportage of the marvelous: the writer’s task is not to fabricate wonders but to find a form capable of conveying a reality already saturated with the improbable. It also critiques Eurocentric standards of plausibility that misread unfamiliar realities as mere imagination.