Top 100 Carlos Fuentes Quotes
#2. 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.
Carlos Fuentes
#4. At 50 I find there is a long line of characters and shapes demanding words just outside my window.
Carlos Fuentes
#6. I use a lot of film images, analogies, and imagination.
Carlos Fuentes
#8. The French equate intelligence with rational discourse, the Russians with intense soul-searching. For the Mexican, intelligence is inseparable from maliciousness.
Carlos Fuentes
#9. 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.
Carlos Fuentes
#11. 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.
Carlos Fuentes
#12. 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.
Carlos Fuentes
#13. Power does not alter a man's character. It merely reveals it.
Carlos Fuentes
#14. 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.
Carlos Fuentes
#15. 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.
Carlos Fuentes
#16. 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.
Carlos Fuentes
#18. The new world economic order is not an exercise in philanthropy, but in enlightened self-interest for everyone concerned.
Carlos Fuentes
#19. Some writers achieve great popularity and then disappear forever. The bestseller lists of the past fifty years are, with a few lively exceptions, a sombre graveyard of dead books.
Carlos Fuentes
#20. The historical problem of the United States is to admit that it is a multiracial and multi-ethnic nation.
Carlos Fuentes
#21. She begins to feel that the reality show is the university she never attended. Vicarious reality. Emotion without a value-added tax. Movement without danger. Alma finds her reality. She no longer has a reason to put herself at risk and go out into the hostile, degrading world.
Carlos Fuentes
#23. I started my own magazine with drawings, commentary, news, film reviews and drawings.
Carlos Fuentes
#24. What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others.
Carlos Fuentes
#25. 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.
Carlos Fuentes
#26. I am not interested in slice of life, what I want is a slice of the imagination.
Carlos Fuentes
#27. Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre.
Carlos Fuentes
#28. 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.
Carlos Fuentes
#29. 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
Carlos Fuentes
#30. Retrospectively, I would agree with Luis Bunuel that sex without sin is like an egg without salt.
Carlos Fuentes
#31. 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.
Carlos Fuentes
#32. ... my books are derived from city images, and the city of my dreams or nightmares is Mexico City. (The Art of Fiction, No. 68. The Paris Review, No. 82, Winter 1981.)
Carlos Fuentes
#33. We shall have nothing to say in regard to our own death.
Carlos Fuentes
#34. In the name of certainty, the greatest crimes have been committed against humanity.
Carlos Fuentes
#35. Language is always the companion of Empire and Empire ... is one Monarch and one Sword.
Carlos Fuentes
#36. And don't give me the same old story:
"We're in Mexico. Pray."
You'd be better off taking a snake rattle.
Carlos Fuentes
#38. 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.
Carlos Fuentes
#39. What America does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is to understand others.
Carlos Fuentes
#40. The United States is very good at understanding itself, and very bad at understanding others.
Carlos Fuentes
#41. Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.
Carlos Fuentes
#42. Love can isolate us from everything around us. But in its absence, we can be filled with the fear that something comparable exists.
Carlos Fuentes
#43. One wants to tell a story, like Scheherezade, in order not to die. It's one of the oldest urges in mankind. It's a way of stalling death.
Carlos Fuentes
#44. All that was left to me was certain images and all of them spoke to me of the collapse of a cruel world and the slow construction in its stead of another world, equally cruel.
Carlos Fuentes
#46. 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.
Carlos Fuentes
#47. The language of Mexicans springs from abysmal extremes of power and impotence, domination and resentment.
Carlos Fuentes
#48. I prefer that these reserves be spent in arguing whether Mary conceived without sin, whether Christ was God or man, rather than discussing whether my power is of divine origin and if, in short, I am deserving of it. Heresy, then, is tolerable as long as it is not employed directly against power.
Carlos Fuentes
#49. Myth is a past with a future, exercising itself in the present.
Carlos Fuentes
#50. 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.
Carlos Fuentes
#51. The women I have loved I have desired for themselves, but also because I feared myself.
Carlos Fuentes
#52. Robinson Crusoe, the first capitalist hero, is a self-made man who accepts objective reality and then fashions it to his needs through the work ethic, common sense, resilience, technology, and, if need be, racism and imperialism.
Carlos Fuentes
#53. There are people whose external reality is generous because it is transparent, because you can read everything, accept everything, understand everything about them: people who carry their own sun with them.
Carlos Fuentes
#54. 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.
Carlos Fuentes
#55. No government functions without the grease of corruption.
Carlos Fuentes
#56. I had the good fortune of having a happy, closely knit family.
Carlos Fuentes
#57. The United States condoned dictatorships in Latin America for much of the 20th century.
Carlos Fuentes
#58. Religion is dogmatic. Politic is ideological. Reason must be logical, but literature has a privilege of being equivocal.
Carlos Fuentes
#59. Incredible the animal that first dreamed of another animal.
Carlos Fuentes
#60. One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.
Carlos Fuentes
#61. By its very nature, the novel indicates that we are becoming. There is no final solution. There is no last word.
Carlos Fuentes
#62. I always felt a little worm inside me: 'Now you need to write a novel with a woman protagonist.'
Carlos Fuentes
#63. 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.
Carlos Fuentes
#64. I live through risk. Without risk there is no art. You should always be on the edge of a cliff about to fall down
and break your neck.
Carlos Fuentes
#65. Writing requires the concentration of the writer, demands that nothing else be done except that.
Carlos Fuentes
#66. 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.
Carlos Fuentes
#67. 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.
Carlos Fuentes
#68. The Mexicans descend from the Aztecs; the Peruvians descend from the Incas; the Argentineans descend from the boats.
Carlos Fuentes
#69. 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.
Carlos Fuentes
#70. The citizen takes his city for granted far too often. He forgets to marvel.
Carlos Fuentes
#73. 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.
Carlos Fuentes
#75. [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.
Carlos Fuentes
#76. You will have given another moment to the moment you are living and to the moments you are going to live; you have perverted time; you have opened a forbidden field to what happened to you before.
Carlos Fuentes
#77. I have two children who died before reaching 30, so who am I to complain about being alive?
Carlos Fuentes
#78. Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me.
Carlos Fuentes
#79. Reading, writing, teaching, learning, are all activities aimed at introducing civilizations to each other.
Carlos Fuentes
#80. I must write the book out in my head now, before I sit down.
Carlos Fuentes
#81. Did we come here to laugh or cry ? Are we dying or being born ?
Carlos Fuentes
#82. Alessandra approached the geniuses of the past to give them life with her attention, which was the form her affection took: paying attention.
Carlos Fuentes
#83. 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.
Carlos Fuentes
#85. 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.
Carlos Fuentes
#86. Death is the great Maecenas, Death is the great angel of writing. You must write because you are not going to live any more.
Carlos Fuentes
#87. Nor is the limitation of what is sayable a limit to the doable: this last is the possibility of literature.
Carlos Fuentes
#88. Did you know we know we are all the object of another's imagination?
Carlos Fuentes
#89. There must be something beyond slaughter and barbarism to support the existence of mankind and we must all help search for it.
Carlos Fuentes
#90. Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.
Carlos Fuentes
#91. I am a literary animal. For me, everything ends in literature.
Carlos Fuentes
#92. Here among my books, my wife, my friends and my loves, I have plenty of reasons to keep living.
Carlos Fuentes
#93. There is no creation without tradition; the 'new' is an inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a variation on the past.
Carlos Fuentes
#94. There are now 30-year-old Mexican writers who do great novels in which Mexico isn't even mentioned.
Carlos Fuentes
#95. If the Soviet Union can give up the Brezhnev Doctrine for the Sinatra Doctrine, the United States can give up the James Monroe Doctrine for the Marilyn Monroe Doctrine: Let's all go to bed wearing the perfume we like best.
Carlos Fuentes
#96. My system for staying young is to work a lot, to always have a project on the go.
Carlos Fuentes
#97. 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.
Carlos Fuentes
#99. You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not to die.
Carlos Fuentes
#100. Originality' is the sickness of modernity that wishes to see itself as something new, always new, in order continually to witness its own birth. In doing so, modernity is that fashionable illusion which only speaks to death
Carlos Fuentes
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