- Start
- Yo No Vengo a Decir Un Discurso / I Did Not Come to Give a Speech
**** "What am I doing here on this perch of honor, when I have always considered speeches the most terrifying of human obligations?" The speeches that Gabriel García Márquez has gathered in this collection were written by the author with the intention of being read by him before an audience, and span the course of nearly his entire life, from the first, a farewell written at seventeen to his fellow students at Zipaquirá, to his appearance before the Spanish-language Academies and the kings of Spain on his eightieth birthday.Combined, these speeches provide a more profound understanding of the life of this Nobel Prize winner, revealing his fundamental creative and civil obsessions: his intense aptitude for literature and writing, his passion for journalism, his concerns over looming environmental dangers, his proposal for the simplification of grammar, the problems facing his beloved Colombian homeland, and the loving memory of fellow writers like Julio Cortázar and Álvaro Mutis, among many others.In Yo no vengo a decir un discurso (I did not come to give a speech), the reader holds in his/her hands the essential complement to a body of work that will continue speaking to us for a long time to come." />