Carlos Fuentes Quotes

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

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

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

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

In literature, you know only what you imagine

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

To read and write is a paradise.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

…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.)