I don't think it is worth explaining how a character's nose or chin looks. It is my feeling that readers will prefer to construct, little by little, their own character, the author will do well to entrust the reader with this part of the work.
For me, the most important thing about the "Barranquilla Group" is that I had all sorts of books available. Because Alfonso Fuenmayor, Alvaro Cepeda, and Germán Vargas were there, and they were voracious readers. They had all the books. We'd get drunk until sunrise talking about literature, and one night there might be ten books I didn't know, but next day I had them. Germán would bring me two, Alfonso, three.
The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.
It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.
The proliferation of mass graphomania among politicians, cab drivers, women on the delivery table, mistresses, murderers, criminals, prostitutes, police chiefs, doctors, and patients proves to me that every individual without exception bears a potential writer within himself and that all mankind has every right to rush out into the streets with a cry of "We are all writers!"
Most critical fault-finding, when reduced to its essentials, simply amounts to reproach of the author because he is himself: thinks, feels, sees, and creates, as himself, instead of seeing and creating in the way the critic would have done.
American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.
The book which the reader now holds in his hands, from one end to the other, as a whole and in its details, whatever gaps, exceptions, or weaknesses it may contain, treats of the advance from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsity to truth, from darkness to daylight, from blind appetite to conscience, from decay to life, from bestiality to duty, from Hell to Heaven, from limbo to God. Matter itself is the starting-point, and the point of arrival is the soul. Hydra at the beginning, an angel at the end.
You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.
We writers, and especially writers for children, but all writers, have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were, to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.