Quotes By 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Don't classify me, read me.

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

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

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

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.

Cuba needs a dose of perestroika.

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

I love having critics for breakfast.

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

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.

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

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

The real bombs are my books, not me.

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.

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

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

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