Top 30 Carlos Fuentes Quotes

In Latin America, even atheists are Catholics.

I have two children who died before reaching 30, so who am I to complain about being alive?

I love having critics for breakfast.

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

What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others.

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.

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.

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.

I am a literary animal. For me, everything ends in literature.

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.

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

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.

I’ve lost audiences, I’ve recovered them.

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

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

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.

I use a lot of film images, analogies, and imagination.

Don’t classify me, read me.

Writing requires the concentration of the writer, demands that nothing else be done except that.

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.

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.

I have no literary fears.

The real bombs are my books, not me.

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.

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.

Cuba needs a dose of perestroika.

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.

I started my own magazine with drawings, commentary, news, film reviews and drawings.

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