A Cautionary Tale for Literary Critics

Gabriel García Márquez, commenting on the critical response to his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude:

Most critics don't realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends; and so, with some pre-ordained right to pontificate they take on the responsibility of decoding the book and risk making terrible fools of themselves.

Márquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, and this quotation is from an interview that appears in The Fragrance of Guava, p. 72.