Carlos Fuentes Quotes

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

Incredible the animal that first dreamed of another animal.

... is it the young who pass death to the old, or do the old bequeath it to the young?
― Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra

One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.

Work is what saves you.

The novel is the privileged vehicle of two ways of being: narrative and freedom: to be new (novel) in a speech open to all, and to be free in a speech that never concludes.

What America does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is to understand others.

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

I always felt a little worm inside me: 'Now you need to write a novel with a woman protagonist.'

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

The great wheel of fire of ancient wisdom, silence and word engendering the myth of the origin, human action engendering the epic voyage toward the other; historical violence revealing the tragic flaw of the hero who must then return to the land of origin; myth of death and renewal and silence from which new words and images will arise, keeps on turning in spite of the blindness of purely lineal thought.

Since in the world you imagines, a world without power and money, with no prohibitions, with no pain or death, each man would be God, and God therefore would not be possible. He would be a lie, because His attributes would be those of every man, woman and child: grace, immortality and supreme good.

Religion is dogmatic. Politic is ideological. Reason must be logical, but literature has a privilege of being equivocal.

The historical problem of the United States is to admit that it is a multiracial and multi-ethnic nation.

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

Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me.

Children know how to be cruel, and the cruelty of their elders is the surest residue of the malaise the young feel toward things strange, things other, things that reveal our own ignorance or insufficiency

Nor is the limitation of what is sayable a limit to the doable: this last is the possibility of literature.

I discovered very quickly that criticism is a form of optimism, and that when you are silent about the shortcomings of your society, you're very pessimistic about that society. And it's only when you speak truthfully about it that you show your faith in that society.

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.

You, yesterday, did the usual things, just as any day, You don't know if it's worth remembering. You would prefer to remember, there lying in the half-darkness of the bedroom, not what has happened already but what is going to happen. In your half-darkness your eyes would prefer to look ahead, not behind, and they do not know how to foresee the past.

Retrospectively, I would agree with Luis Bunuel that sex without sin is like an egg without salt.

All truth is double, and perhaps multiple; absolute reason is as dangerous as absolute faith; reason also has its madness

We shall have nothing to say in regard to our own death.

Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.

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

The language of Mexicans springs from abysmal extremes of power and impotence, domination and resentment.

Envy is resentment of good things that happen to other people. Jealousy increases the importance of the person we wish belonged only to us. Envy, as I told you, is poison, and futile - we want to be the other person. But jealousy is generous - we want the other person to be ours.

But history does repeat itself; that is the comedy and the crime of history. Men learn nothing. Times change. Scenes change. Names change. But passions are the same.

In a world torn by every kind of fundamentalism - religious, ethnic, nationalist and tribal - we must grant first place to economic fundamentalism, with its religious conviction that the market, left to its own devices, is capable of resolving all our problems. This faith has its own ayatollahs. Its church is neo-liberalism; its creed is profit; its prayers are for monopolies.

Power does not alter a man's character. It merely reveals it.

He felt satisfied, and that sensation should have put him on his guard; happiness is a momentary trap that disguises stubborn problems and makes us feel more vulnerable than ever to the blind legitmacy of bad luck.

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.

You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not to die.

What is the strongest pretext for loving? ... If it is necessary, our atomized consciousness invents love, imagines it or feigns it, but does not live without it, since in the midst of infinite dispersion, love, even if as a pretext , gives us the measure of our loss.

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

The mystery of other individuals, señor caballero, is ordinarily grief we neither share nor understand.

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.

Love can isolate us from everything around us. But in its absence, we can be filled with the fear that something comparable exists.

The citizen takes his city for granted far too often. He forgets to marvel.

Myth is a past with a future, exercising itself in the present.

...uncontrolled passions are like poison. Dormant, they are vices, they feed the soul, and the soul, deceived, or believing it is being nourished, is in fact being poisoned by its own unknown and unruly passion. Is it true, as other heretics, the Cathars, believed, that the best way to rid oneself of passion is to bring it into the open and indulge it, with no restraint of any kind?

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.

Writing is a struggle against silence.

The women I have loved I have desired for themselves, but also because I feared myself.

Literature is a wound from which flows the indispensable divorce between words and things. All our blood can flow out of that hole.

In the name of certainty, the greatest crimes have been committed against humanity.

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

And don't give me the same old story:
"We're in Mexico. Pray."
You'd be better off taking a snake rattle.

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

Without its changing shape or dimensions all of a lifetime's memories fit miraculously within it, perhaps revealing a mystery ... Memory was not something that overflowed or was shoehorned into the shape of an object; it was something that was distilled, transformed, with each new experience.

In literature, you know only what you imagine

Did we come here to laugh or cry ? Are we dying or being born ?

He himself felt defeated because he was fighting against something he did not hate, because he did not understand the fratricidal hatred between the sons of Araby and Israel, and because he loved and knew and appreciated and wanted to save the merits of their cultures, although not the cruelty of their powers; he knew and loved the fountains and the gardens and the patios and high towers of al-Andalus, the nature that has been made more beautiful by man for man's pleasure, not for his mortification.

Normality; show me normality, señor caballero, and I will show you an exception to the abnormal order of the universe; show me a normal event and I shall call it miraculous because it is normal.

He thought that even naturalness can be feigned; at times, a mask disguises too well the expressions of a face that does not exist either outside or under it.

[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.

The contract between the author and the reader is a game. And the game ... is one of the greatest invetions of Western civilization: the game of telling stories, inventing characters, and creating the imaginary paradise of the individual, from whence no one can be expelled because, in a novel, no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be heard and understood.

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

No government functions without the grease of corruption.

I'm a writer, not a genre.

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 logic of the symbol does not express the experiment; it is the experiment. Language is the phenomenon, and the observation of the phenomenon changes its nature.

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.

Alessandra approached the geniuses of the past to give them life with her attention, which was the form her affection took: paying attention.

Finished, the book begins.

By its very nature, the novel indicates that we are becoming. There is no final solution. There is no last word.

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.

For me, life without literature is inconceivable. I think that Don Quixote in a physical sense never existed, but Don Quixote exists more than anybody who existed in 1605. Much more. There's nobody who can compete with Don Quixote or with Hamlet. So in the end we have the reality of the book as the reality of the world and the reality of history.

No, it's not that they're bad. It's that they're obliged to pretend they're good. They've been brought up to deceive and be cunning, to protect themselves from our society. I don't want to be like that.

You will seek a way to have thoughts, feeling that if you think you will have to remember. There will be things you do want to remember and others you would like, or that you will need, to forget.

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

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.

Memory is satisfied desire.

Don't classify me, read me.

Since I neither want not can influence the events of the world, my mission is to preserve the internal integrity and equilibrium of my mind; that will be in which the manor in which I recover the purity of the original act; I shall be my own citadel, and to it I shall retire to protect myself against a hostile and corrupt world. I shall be my own citadel and, within it, my own and only citizen.

Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate.

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

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.

Art gives life to what history killed. Art gives voice to what history denied, silenced, or persecuted. Art brings truth to the lies of history.