Carlos Fuentes Quotes
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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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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 have two children who died before reaching 30, so who am I to complain about being alive?
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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 always felt a little worm inside me: 'Now you need to write a novel with a woman protagonist.'
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I started my own magazine with drawings, commentary, news, film reviews and drawings.
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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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I use a lot of film images, analogies, and imagination.
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Work is what saves you.
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I am not interested in slice of life, what I want is a slice of the imagination.
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I like fighting. I get into rows all the time.
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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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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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Here among my books, my wife, my friends and my loves, I have plenty of reasons to keep living.
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I'm a writer, not a genre.
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I've lost audiences, I've recovered them.
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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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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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There are now 30-year-old Mexican writers who do great novels in which Mexico isn't even mentioned.
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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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No government functions without the grease of corruption.
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The Mexican revolution was a break with the past to recover the past. We were trying to deny we had an Indian and a black and a Spanish past. The Mexican Revolution accepted all heritages. It allowed Mexico to be mestizo.