The Syntax of Wisdom

"To begin with, I realized that my two great defects were the two greatest defects possible: the clumsiness of my writing and my ignorance of the human heart. "

Gabriel Garcia Marquez passes a devastating and instructive judgment on his first published story. My fear of my ignorance on both counts made me serve a long apprenticeship in style and in life till my first poems came out at forty.

Don't wait too long to finish work and put it in the world: we would have no Keats had he waited for his thirties. But never stop learning, I would suggest, the intimate ecology of the heart, the divine intricacy of the natural world, and a charged clarity of style (a simplicity not too clear and a clarity not too simple) that is the idiom in which the heart and the world get their Being enacted, and which they deserve in response from anyone who presumes to write.

For more on Marquez and how he learned grace and life, look at this—a short memoir published years ago in The New Yorker and released again today. And reread—for a turning inside out of tyranny like that we see enacted here and there in the world today—his novel, The Autumn of the Patriarch.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/10/06/the-challenge-gabriel-garcia-marquez?