Sri Lanka, July 13 -- The celebrated novelist and Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez is said to have had an unusual habit. During the course of a conversation with his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, the transcripts of which were published in 1982 as 'The Fragrance of Guava,' Marquez revealed that every morning his wife Mercedes would keep a sheaf of 50 papers by his typewriter. Here's the idiosyncrasy - if he made any typing error or wasn't satisfied with even a single word typed, Marquez would take the paper out of the typewriter and toss it into the wastepaper basket.

This book was published in 1982. I don't know if Marquez switched to a computer which would have of course eliminated the need to waste paper in the interest of perfec...