MEXICO CITY: Colombian writer and Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez hailed journalism as the best profession, in rare public comments in northern Mexico.

“There’s no better job than journalism,” said the 81-year-old author of One Hundred Years of

Solitude, who started out as a journalist and often says he writes to avoid having to speak.

“We enjoy it when we find a jewel (of a story), but suffer like dogs when we see language used badly,” said Garcia Marquez, who has lived in Mexico for several decades. The author spoke at a seminar in the northern city of Monterrey.

Garcia Marquez lamented the lack of time that modern journalists have to carry out their work, in a conversation with students and journalists.

“When someone is under pressure, they don’t have time to think, and the next day they say to themselves: ‘it would have been better to do this’,” he said.

It bothered him so much that he sometimes telephoned editors and journalists to argue it out with them.

“It’s better to write a book,” said the author of many non-fiction works and short stories, as well as acclaimed novels Love in the Time of Cholera and Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Garcia Marquez, famous for popularising the literary style known as magical realism, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

His most recent novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, follows the romance of a 90-year-old and a pubescent girl. The book was banned in Iran. He confirmed that he would finish another book, about love, before the end of the year.

Asked if it would be his last, Garcia Marquez replied. “The last? Never.”