Quotes By Carlos Fuentes

I have no literary fears.

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.

Here among my books, my wife, my friends and my loves, I have plenty of reasons to keep living.

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.

The new world economic order is not an exercise in philanthropy, but in enlightened self-interest for everyone concerned.

I am not interested in slice of life, what I want is a slice of the imagination.

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.

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.

I'm a writer, not a genre.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Don't classify me, read me.

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

The United States is very good at understanding itself, and very bad at understanding others.

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.

Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.

Cuba needs a dose of perestroika.

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.

I must write the book out in my head now, before I sit down.

I love having critics for breakfast.

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.

There must be something beyond slaughter and barbarism to support the existence of mankind and we must all help search for it.