Quotes By Carlos Fuentes

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'm a writer, not a genre.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Don't classify me, read me.

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.

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