Carlos Fuentes Quotes
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The United States is very good at understanding itself, and very bad at understanding others.
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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.
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I have two children who died before reaching 30, so who am I to complain about being alive?
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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.
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I always felt a little worm inside me: 'Now you need to write a novel with a woman protagonist.'
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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.
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I use a lot of film images, analogies, and imagination.
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I like fighting. I get into rows all the time.
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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.
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I started my own magazine with drawings, commentary, news, film reviews and drawings.
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Work is what saves you.
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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.
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I'm a writer, not a genre.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I've lost audiences, I've recovered them.
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There are now 30-year-old Mexican writers who do great novels in which Mexico isn't even mentioned.
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Here among my books, my wife, my friends and my loves, I have plenty of reasons to keep living.
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Don't classify me, read me.
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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.
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The North American world blinds us with its energy; we cannot see ourselves, we must see you.
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The facade of the Conquest, severe yet jocund, with one foot in the dead Old World and the other in the New.
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If the Soviet Union can give up the Brezhnev Doctrine for the Sinatra Doctrine, the United States can give up the James Monroe Doctrine for the Marilyn Monroe Doctrine: Let's all go to bed wearing the perfume we like best.