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What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others.
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One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.
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Cuba needs a dose of perestroika.
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I had the good fortune of having a happy, closely knit family.
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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.
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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.
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I am a literary animal. For me, everything ends in literature.
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Writing requires the concentration of the writer, demands that nothing else be done except that.
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Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.
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The new world economic order is not an exercise in philanthropy, but in enlightened self-interest for everyone concerned.
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Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.
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The United States condoned dictatorships in Latin America for much of the 20th century.
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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.
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In Latin America, even atheists are Catholics.
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I have no literary fears.
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Can you imagine me coming to this country to blow up a post office? I told them, 'My bombs are my books.'
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There must be something beyond slaughter and barbarism to support the existence of mankind and we must all help search for it.
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I must write the book out in my head now, before I sit down.
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My system for staying young is to work a lot, to always have a project on the go.
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The United States is very good at understanding itself, and very bad at understanding others.
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The historical problem of the United States is to admit that it is a multiracial and multi-ethnic nation.
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I love having critics for breakfast.
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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.
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The real bombs are my books, not me.