Carlos Fuentes Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

Cuba needs a dose of perestroika. — Carlos Fuentes

Power does not alter a man's character. It merely reveals it. — Carlos Fuentes

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

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. — Carlos Fuentes

Myth is a past with a future, exercising itself in the present. — Carlos Fuentes

Because it's a fucking disaster to be creative when you know you're not Mozart or Keats. Dammit, I got tired of scratching around in my past. There's nothing in me to justify the pretension of creativity. This came before anything, before you, before Raquel, this is a matter of my own emptiness, my awareness of my own limits, maybe my sterility. Does what I'm saying to you seem awful? Now you want to come along and sell me an illusion, which I don't believe in but which does make me believe that either you're a fool or you underestimate my intelligence. Why don't you just leave me alone, so I can fill the emptiness in my own way? Let me see things for myself, learn if something can still grow in my soul, an idea, a faith, because I swear to you, Laura, my soul is more desolate than this rock landscape you see here ... why? — Carlos Fuentes

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

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. — Carlos Fuentes

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. — Carlos Fuentes

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. — Carlos Fuentes

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

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

Incredible the animal that first dreamed of another animal. — Carlos Fuentes

Don't classify me, read me. — Carlos Fuentes

Without its changing shape or dimensions all of a lifetime's memories fit miraculously within it, perhaps revealing a mystery ... Memory was not something that overflowed or was shoehorned into the shape of an object; it was something that was distilled, transformed, with each new experience. — Carlos Fuentes

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

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

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

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. — Carlos Fuentes

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

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

Writing requires the concentration of the writer, demands that nothing else be done except that. — Carlos Fuentes

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

Envy is resentment of good things that happen to other people. Jealousy increases the importance of the person we wish belonged only to us. Envy, as I told you, is poison, and futile - we want to be the other person. But jealousy is generous - we want the other person to be ours. — Carlos Fuentes

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

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. — Carlos Fuentes

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. — Carlos Fuentes

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

You will seek a way to have thoughts, feeling that if you think you will have to remember. There will be things you do want to remember and others you would like, or that you will need, to forget. — Carlos Fuentes

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

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. — Carlos Fuentes

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. — Carlos Fuentes

And the frontier in here?" the North American woman had asked, tapping her forehead. "And the frontier in hear?" General Arroyo had responded, touching his heart. "There's one frontier we only dare to cross at night," the old gringo said. "The frontier of our differences with others, of our battles with ourselves. — Carlos Fuentes

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. — Carlos Fuentes

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. — Carlos Fuentes

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

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

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. — Carlos Fuentes

Nor is the limitation of what is sayable a limit to the doable: this last is the possibility of literature. — Carlos Fuentes

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

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

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.
— Carlos Fuentes

What is the strongest pretext for loving? ... If it is necessary, our atomized consciousness invents love, imagines it or feigns it, but does not live without it, since in the midst of infinite dispersion, love, even if as a pretext , gives us the measure of our loss. — Carlos Fuentes

My design, the ancient man said, sucking his lips, is not to win battles with words but to convince the head and the heart of man that we must accept the world as it is, and peacefully; the world we live in is well ordered and offers rewarding riches to those who accept their place in it without protest. — Carlos Fuentes

The historical problem of the United States is to admit that it is a multiracial and multi-ethnic nation. — Carlos Fuentes

Originality' is the sickness of modernity that wishes to see itself as something new, always new, in order continually to witness its own birth. In doing so, modernity is that fashionable illusion which only speaks to death — Carlos Fuentes

I have no literary fears. — Carlos Fuentes

There are now 30-year-old Mexican writers who do great novels in which Mexico isn't even mentioned. — Carlos Fuentes

Writing is a struggle against silence. — Carlos Fuentes

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

He felt satisfied, and that sensation should have put him on his guard; happiness is a momentary trap that disguises stubborn problems and makes us feel more vulnerable than ever to the blind legitmacy of bad luck. — Carlos Fuentes

Work is what saves you. — Carlos Fuentes

You will wish and not wish to see. — Carlos Fuentes

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

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. — Carlos Fuentes

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

... my books are derived from city images, and the city of my dreams or nightmares is Mexico City. (The Art of Fiction, No. 68. The Paris Review, No. 82, Winter 1981.) — Carlos Fuentes

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. — Carlos Fuentes

I like fighting. I get into rows all the time. — Carlos Fuentes

The logic of the symbol does not express the experiment; it is the experiment. Language is the phenomenon, and the observation of the phenomenon changes its nature. — Carlos Fuentes

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. — Carlos Fuentes

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

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. — Carlos Fuentes

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. — Carlos Fuentes

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. — Carlos Fuentes

And don't give me the same old story:
"We're in Mexico. Pray."
You'd be better off taking a snake rattle. — Carlos Fuentes

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

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

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

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. — Carlos Fuentes

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

Since I neither want not can influence the events of the world, my mission is to preserve the internal integrity and equilibrium of my mind; that will be in which the manor in which I recover the purity of the original act; I shall be my own citadel, and to it I shall retire to protect myself against a hostile and corrupt world. I shall be my own citadel and, within it, my own and only citizen. — Carlos Fuentes

Language is always the companion of Empire and Empire ... is one Monarch and one Sword. — Carlos Fuentes

Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror. — Carlos Fuentes

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. — Carlos Fuentes

Alessandra approached the geniuses of the past to give them life with her attention, which was the form her affection took: paying attention. — Carlos Fuentes

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

Did you know we know we are all the object of another's imagination? — Carlos Fuentes

Literature is a wound from which flows the indispensable divorce between words and things. All our blood can flow out of that hole. — Carlos Fuentes

Marco Polo had been to China; Vasco de Gama had discovered the route to the Cape. The continent was in ferment, in movement, whereas the Mexican world was ... absolutely hermetically closed. The arrival of the Spaniards must have been like the arrival of people from Mars ... totally unsuspected aliens. The shock must have been profound ... I think it's one of the reasons behind the downfall of the Aztec Empire. In a sense, I think the Aztec Empire died of astonishment, more than anything else. — Carlos Fuentes

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. — Carlos Fuentes

You will have given another moment to the moment you are living and to the moments you are going to live; you have perverted time; you have opened a forbidden field to what happened to you before. — Carlos Fuentes

[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. — Carlos Fuentes

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. — Carlos Fuentes

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. — Carlos Fuentes

He himself felt defeated because he was fighting against something he did not hate, because he did not understand the fratricidal hatred between the sons of Araby and Israel, and because he loved and knew and appreciated and wanted to save the merits of their cultures, although not the cruelty of their powers; he knew and loved the fountains and the gardens and the patios and high towers of al-Andalus, the nature that has been made more beautiful by man for man's pleasure, not for his mortification. — Carlos Fuentes

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. — Carlos Fuentes

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. — Carlos Fuentes

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

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

I love having critics for breakfast. — Carlos Fuentes

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. — Carlos Fuentes

Memory is satisfied desire. — Carlos Fuentes

In literature, you know only what you imagine — Carlos Fuentes

What I want is to respond to the challenge posed by the mass media - to permit the novel to say what can only be said by narrative - to allow it to be itself. — Carlos Fuentes

But history does repeat itself; that is the comedy and the crime of history. Men learn nothing. Times change. Scenes change. Names change. But passions are the same. — Carlos Fuentes

The real bombs are my books, not me. — Carlos Fuentes