Utopia according to Gabriel García Márquez

This is an extract from the Nobel lecture given by Gabriel García Márquez when his received his award in 1982:

"On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said, «I decline to accept the end of man». I would fall unworthy of standing in this place that was his, if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possibility. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth."

cited by Jay Winter in Dreams of Peace and Freedom.

read the full lecture.