Carlos Fuentes Quotes
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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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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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The United States is very good at understanding itself, and very bad at understanding others.
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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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I started my own magazine with drawings, commentary, news, film reviews and drawings.
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I like fighting. I get into rows all the time.
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I use a lot of film images, analogies, and imagination.
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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 always felt a little worm inside me: 'Now you need to write a novel with a woman protagonist.'
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Work is what saves you.
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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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There are now 30-year-old Mexican writers who do great novels in which Mexico isn't even mentioned.
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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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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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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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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've lost audiences, I've recovered them.
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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 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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No government functions without the grease of corruption.