Carlos Fuentes Quotes
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.
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.
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.
Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate.
Religion is dogmatic. Politic is ideological. Reason must be logical, but literature has a privilege of being equivocal.
There is no creation without tradition; the 'new' is an inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a variation on the past.
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.
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.
By its very nature, the novel indicates that we are becoming. There is no final solution. There is no last word.
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.
The Mexicans descend from the Aztecs; the Peruvians descend from the Incas; the Argentineans descend from the boats.
Reading, writing, teaching, learning, are all activities aimed at introducing civilizations to each other.
The French equate intelligence with rational discourse, the Russians with intense soul-searching. For the Mexican, intelligence is inseparable from maliciousness.
The new world economic order is not an exercise in philanthropy, but in enlightened self-interest for everyone concerned.
Death is the great Maecenas, Death is the great angel of writing. You must write because you are not going to live any more.
I started my own magazine with drawings, commentary, news, film reviews and drawings.
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.
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.
There must be something beyond slaughter and barbarism to support the existence of mankind and we must all help search for it.
I have two children who died before reaching 30, so who am I to complain about being alive?
The United States condoned dictatorships in Latin America for much of the 20th century.
Mexico is a very complex, mysterious country. I will never understand it fully, and that's why I write so much about it, in order to try to understand it.
Here among my books, my wife, my friends and my loves, I have plenty of reasons to keep living.
The women I have loved I have desired for themselves, but also because I feared myself.
One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.
At 50 I find there is a long line of characters and shapes demanding words just outside my window.
