Quotes By Carlos Fuentes

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I am not interested in slice of life, what I want is a slice of the imagination.

Cuba needs a dose of perestroika.

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.

I love having critics for breakfast.

I'm a writer, not a genre.

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.

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.

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

Work is what saves you.

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

Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.