Carlos Fuentes quotes:

Like all of Latin America, Mexico after independence in 1821 turned its back on a triple heritage: on the Spanish heritage, because we were newly liberated colonies, and on our Indian and black heritages, because we considered them backward and barbaric. We looked towards France, England and the U.S., to become progressive democratic republics.

What's happened at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq is one of the grossest violations of human rights under the Geneva Conventions that we have record of. It is simply monstrous.

If the Soviet Union can give up the Brezhnev Doctrine for the Sinatra Doctrine, the United States can give up the James Monroe Doctrine for the Marilyn Monroe Doctrine: Let's all go to bed wearing the perfume we like best.

Diplomacy in a sense is the opposite of writing. You have to disperse yourself so much: the lady who comes in crying because she's had a fight with the secretary; exports and imports; students in trouble; thumbtacks for the embassy.

The new world economic order is not an exercise in philanthropy, but in enlightened self-interest for everyone concerned.

The United States has written the white history of the United States. It now needs to write the black, Latino, Indian, Asian and Caribbean history of the United States.

Contrary to the macho culture of Mexico, both my grandmothers were very brave young widows. I was always very close to these hard-working, intelligent women.

Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.

The United States is very good at understanding itself, and very bad at understanding others.

The possibility of being as free with the camera as we are with the pen is a fantastic prospect for the creative life of the 21st century.

I use a lot of film images, analogies, and imagination.

My system for staying young is to work a lot, to always have a project on the go.

I am not interested in slice of life, what I want is a slice of the imagination.

Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me.

The Mexicans descend from the Aztecs; the Peruvians descend from the Incas; the Argentineans descend from the boats.

One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.

I started my own magazine with drawings, commentary, news, film reviews and drawings.

I had the good fortune of having a happy, closely knit family.

I must write the book out in my head now, before I sit down.

There must be something beyond slaughter and barbarism to support the existence of mankind and we must all help search for it.

I live through risk. Without risk there is no art. You should always be on the edge of a cliff about to fall down and break your neck.

I am a morning writer; I am writing at eight-thirty in longhand and I keep at it until twelve-thirty, when I go for a swim. Then I come back, have lunch, and read in the afternoon until I take my walk for the next day's writing.

I have no literary fears.

Here among my books, my wife, my friends and my loves, I have plenty of reasons to keep living.

The novel is the privileged vehicle of two ways of being: narrative and freedom: to be new (novel) in a speech open to all, and to be free in a speech that never concludes.

I discovered very quickly that criticism is a form of optimism, and that when you are silent about the shortcomings of your society, you're very pessimistic about that society. And it's only when you speak truthfully about it that you show your faith in that society."

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

I have two children who died before reaching 30, so who am I to complain about being alive?

U.S. foreign policy is Manichaean. It's like a Hollywood movie. You have to know who has the white hat and who has the black hat and then go against the black hat.

Children know how to be cruel, and the cruelty of their elders is the surest residue of the malaise the young feel toward things strange, things other, things that reveal our own ignorance or insufficiency

Robinson Crusoe, the first capitalist hero, is a self-made man who accepts objective reality and then fashions it to his needs through the work ethic, common sense, resilience, technology, and, if need be, racism and imperialism.

Under the veneer of Westernization, the cultures of the Indian world - which have existed for 30,000 years! - continue to live. Sometimes in a magical way, sometimes in the shadows.

all that was left to me was certain images and all of them spoke to me of the collapse of a cruel world and the slow construction in its stead of another world, equally cruel.

One wants to tell a story, like Scheherezade, in order not to die. It's one of the oldest urges in mankind. It's a way of stalling death.

Reading, writing, teaching, learning, are all activities aimed at introducing civilizations to each other.

Writing is a struggle against silence.

You have an absolute freedom in Mexican writing today in which you don't necessarily have to deal with the Mexican identity. You know why? Because we have an identity... We know who we are. We know what it means to be a Mexican.

I believe in books that do not go to a ready-made public. I'm looking for readers I would like to make. To win them, to create readers rather than to give something that readers are expecting. That would bore me to death.

Don't classify me, read me.

The United States condoned dictatorships in Latin America for much of the 20th century.

Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.

The real bombs are my books, not me.

What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others.

Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre.

No government functions without the grease of corruption.

I need, therefore I imagine.

In a world torn by every kind of fundamentalism - religious, ethnic, nationalist and tribal - we must grant first place to economic fundamentalism, with its religious conviction that the market, left to its own devices, is capable of resolving all our problems. This faith has its own ayatollahs. Its church is neo-liberalism; its creed is profit; its prayers are for monopolies.

I discovered very quickly that criticism is a form of optimism, and that when you are silent about the shortcomings of your society, you're very pessimistic about that society. And it's only when you speak truthfully about it that you show your faith in that society.

You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not to die.

Love can isolate us from everything around us. But in its absence, we can be filled with the fear that something comparable exists.

Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate.

Art gives life to what history killed. Art gives voice to what history denied, silenced, or persecuted. Art brings truth to the lies of history.

Religion is dogmatic. Politic is ideological. Reason must be logical, but literature has a privilege of being equivocal.

The language of Mexicans springs from abysmal extremes of power and impotence, domination and resentment.

You have an absolute freedom in Mexican writing today in which you dont necessarily have to deal with the Mexican identity. You know why? Because we have an identity... We know who we are. We know what it means to be a Mexican.

There is no creation without tradition; the 'new' is an inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a variation on the past.

You, yesterday, did the usual things, just as any day, You don't know if it's worth remembering. You would prefer to remember, there lying in the half-darkness of the bedroom, not what has happened already but what is going to happen. In your half-darkness your eyes would prefer to look ahead, not behind, and they do not know how to foresee the past.

What America does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is to understand others.

The French equate intelligence with rational discourse, the Russians with intense soul-searching. For the Mexican, intelligence is inseparable from maliciousness.

chaos: it has no plural.

Retrospectively, I would agree with Luis Bunuel that sex without sin is like an egg without salt.

By its very nature, the novel indicates that we are becoming. There is no final solution. There is no last word.

Incredible the animal that first dreamed of another animal.

Death is the great Maecenas, Death is the great angel of writing. You must write because you are not going to live any more.

To read and write is a paradise.

In Latin America, even atheists are Catholics.

I've lost audiences, I've recovered them.

The great wheel of fire of ancient wisdom, silence and word engendering the myth of the origin, human action engendering the epic voyage toward the other; historical violence revealing the tragic flaw of the hero who must then return to the land of origin; myth of death and renewal and silence from which new words and images will arise, keeps on turning in spite of the blindness of purely lineal thought.

Memory is satisfied desire.

Diplomacy in a sense is the opposite of writing. You have to disperse yourself so much: the lady who comes in crying because shes had a fight with the secretary; exports and imports; students in trouble; thumbtacks for the embassy.

Cuba needs a dose of perestroika.

The citizen takes his city for granted far too often. He forgets to marvel.

There are people whose external reality is generous because it is transparent, because you can read everything, accept everything, understand everything about them: people who carry their own sun with them.

Some writers achieve great popularity and then disappear forever. The bestseller lists of the past fifty years are, with a few lively exceptions, a sombre graveyard of dead books.

I like fighting. I get into rows all the time.

I love having critics for breakfast

No, it's not that they're bad. It's that they're obliged to pretend they're good. They've been brought up to deceive and be cunning, to protect themselves from our society. I don't want to be like that.

There is no creation without tradition. No one creates from nothing.

The women I have loved I have desired for themselves, but also because I feared myself.

In literature, you know only what you imagine

In the name of certainty, the greatest crimes have been committed against humanity.

I am a literary animal. For me, everything ends in literature.

I always felt a little worm inside me: 'Now you need to write a novel with a woman protagonist.

At 50 I find there is a long line of characters and shapes demanding words just outside my window.

The contract between the author and the reader is a game. And the game . . . is one of the greatest invetions of Western civilization: the game of telling stories, inventing characters, and creating the imaginary paradise of the individual, from whence no one can be expelled because, in a novel, no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be heard and understood.

[The Mexican revolution] was a break with the past to recover the past. We were trying to deny we had an Indian and a black and a Spanish past. The Mexican Revolution accepted all heritages. It allowed Mexico to be mestizo.

For me, life without literature is inconceivable. I think that Don Quixote in a physical sense never existed, but Don Quixote exists more than anybody who existed in 1605. Much more. There's nobody who can compete with Don Quixote or with Hamlet. So in the end we have the reality of the book as the reality of the world and the reality of history.