Carlos Fuentes Quotes

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

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

Writing is a struggle against silence.

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.

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.

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.

I need, therefore I imagine.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

No government functions without the grease of corruption.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

chaos: it has no plural.

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.

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 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.

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

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

Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.

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

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

Incredible the animal that first dreamed of another animal.

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.

Cuba needs a dose of perestroika.

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

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

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.

In Latin America, even atheists are Catholics.

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

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.

When we have a better, more social, more responsible, less egotistical, less corrupt system, Mexico will be able to give work to the millions of Mexicans who have to build our roads, dams, schools, all the things that are left undone in Mexico while we have the manpower. There is something very bad going on, on both sides of the border in Mexico and the US. But the worker is a worker, not a criminal. So, I am in favor of a solution such as the Kennedy-McCain proposals that make it clear what steps have to be taken to accept the fact that the US needs foreign workers.

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

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

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.

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 am a Mexican. The United States lived seventy-five years with the one party system in Mexico - the PRI - without batting an eyelid, never demanding democracy of Mexico. Democracy came because Mexicans fought for democracy and made a democracy out of our history, our possibilities, our perspectives. Democracy is not something that can be exported like Coca-Cola. It has to be bred from the inside, according to the culture, the conditions of each country.

Migration is an opportunity, not a problem. And in the sense that it is an opportunity, it goes on to a bilateral agreement, between Mexico and the US, the US and the Dominican Republic, whatever you wish, and it has to be a multilateral, international event. I am in favor of an international union of migrant workers that really takes on the problems that affect Europe, with the migrants coming from Africa, and the US with the migrants coming from Latin America. It has to be considered an international question, with international solutions, and with no problems national or international.

Most writers in Mexico have had posts as ambassadors, secretaries - that is no longer the case. Now a writer can live off writing. He has an audience: there are publishing houses, there are newspapers - so the situation is not as terrible as it used to be when there were no means and he had to go into government service, be an ambassador or a cabinet minister, etc. So, things are changing in the sense that the civil society is now the protagonist. The writer therefore occupies a different position, but no less influential than in the past, in a new, democratic society.

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