Quotes By Carlos Fuentes

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

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

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.

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.

I love having critics for breakfast.

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.

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

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

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

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

Work is what saves you.

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.

Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.

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.'

In Latin America, even atheists are Catholics.

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.

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

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.

I have no literary fears.

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.

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.

The new world economic order is not an exercise in philanthropy, but in enlightened self-interest for everyone concerned.

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

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.