Top 100 Carlos Fuentes Quotes
#1. I'd always admired the intellectuals who had made the transition into politics - Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru, Vaclav Havel in the Czech Republic, Carlos Fuentes in Mexico - but I knew that many of them had failed, and in any event, I wasn't exactly in their league.
Michael Ignatieff
#2. At a very young age, I was influenced enormously by Julio Cortazar or Carlos Fuentes. In that literature, there's always an exploration of different perspectives, points of view.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
#4. 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
#6. At 50 I find there is a long line of characters and shapes demanding words just outside my window.
Carlos Fuentes
#8. I use a lot of film images, analogies, and imagination.
Carlos Fuentes
#11. The French equate intelligence with rational discourse, the Russians with intense soul-searching. For the Mexican, intelligence is inseparable from maliciousness.
Carlos Fuentes
#12. 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
#14. Didn't you learn anything from my mistakes?" he asks.
Shit, when Alex was in the Latino Blood back in Chicago I worshiped him. "You don't want to hear my answer to that.
Simone Elkeles
#15. 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
#16. K,
the lady at the store said yellow means friendship and red means love. The rosary is the only thing I own that has value to me. It's yours. I'm yours
C.
Simone Elkeles
#17. 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
#18. Power does not alter a man's character. It merely reveals it.
Carlos Fuentes
#19. 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.
Carlos Fuentes
#20. -You think I've got a big ego and an attitude problem?
-I don't think you do, Carlos. I know it. Unfortunately, it's a Fuentes flaw.
-I'd call it an asset. It's what makes us Fuentes brothers irresistible.
Carlos and Brittany
Simone Elkeles
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#25. What happens when I break one of your fuckin' rules?
Simone Elkeles
#26. The new world economic order is not an exercise in philanthropy, but in enlightened self-interest for everyone concerned.
Carlos Fuentes
#27. You're not the only one in this relationship who loves a
challenge," he says. "And just so you know for the future, I like my double-chocolate chip
cookies warm and soft in the middle ... and without magnets glued to them.
Simone Elkeles
#28. 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
#29. The historical problem of the United States is to admit that it is a multiracial and multi-ethnic nation.
Carlos Fuentes
#30. 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
#32. I started my own magazine with drawings, commentary, news, film reviews and drawings.
Carlos Fuentes
#33. What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others.
Carlos Fuentes
#34. 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
#35. I am not interested in slice of life, what I want is a slice of the imagination.
Carlos Fuentes
#36. Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre.
Carlos Fuentes
#37. 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
#38. Do I hear a challenge?" she whispers, "Oh, Carlos. You know I can't resist a challenge.
Simone Elkeles
#39. 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
#40. Retrospectively, I would agree with Luis Bunuel that sex without sin is like an egg without salt.
Carlos Fuentes
#41. 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
#42. ... 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
#43. We shall have nothing to say in regard to our own death.
Carlos Fuentes
#44. In the name of certainty, the greatest crimes have been committed against humanity.
Carlos Fuentes
#45. Language is always the companion of Empire and Empire ... is one Monarch and one Sword.
Carlos Fuentes
#46. 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
#48. Just so you know, I'm goin' to enlist."
"I'm proud of you. But why?"
I groan against the pain but manage to give him a half smile. "I want to make sure Kiara's got a boyfriend who has more to offer than a hot bod and a face that could make angels weep.
Simone Elkeles
#49. 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
#50. What America does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is to understand others.
Carlos Fuentes
#51. The United States is very good at understanding itself, and very bad at understanding others.
Carlos Fuentes
#52. Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.
Carlos Fuentes
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. I'm in deep shit Alex, 'cause I think I'd like nothin' better than to wake up with her every mornin'.
Simone Elkeles
#58. 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
#59. The language of Mexicans springs from abysmal extremes of power and impotence, domination and resentment.
Carlos Fuentes
#60. 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
#61. Myth is a past with a future, exercising itself in the present.
Carlos Fuentes
#62. Literature is a wound from which flows the indispensable divorce between words and things. All our blood can flow out of that hole.
Carlos Fuentes
#63. 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
#64. The women I have loved I have desired for themselves, but also because I feared myself.
Carlos Fuentes
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. No government functions without the grease of corruption.
Carlos Fuentes
#69. I had the good fortune of having a happy, closely knit family.
Carlos Fuentes
#70. The United States condoned dictatorships in Latin America for much of the 20th century.
Carlos Fuentes
#71. Dios mio, I think my brother lost his balls somewhere between here and Mexico. Or maybe Brittany has them zipped inside that fancy purse (of hers).
Simone Elkeles
#72. Religion is dogmatic. Politic is ideological. Reason must be logical, but literature has a privilege of being equivocal.
Carlos Fuentes
#73. Incredible the animal that first dreamed of another animal.
Carlos Fuentes
#74. 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
#75. By its very nature, the novel indicates that we are becoming. There is no final solution. There is no last word.
Carlos Fuentes
#76. I always felt a little worm inside me: 'Now you need to write a novel with a woman protagonist.'
Carlos Fuentes
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. Writing requires the concentration of the writer, demands that nothing else be done except that.
Carlos Fuentes
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. The Mexicans descend from the Aztecs; the Peruvians descend from the Incas; the Argentineans descend from the boats.
Carlos Fuentes
#83. 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
#84. Hey, Carlos," the Professor says when he walks in. "How was REACH?"
"It sucked."
"Can you be more specific?" my guardian asks.
"It really sucked," I elaborate, sarcasm dripping from every word.
Simone Elkeles
#85. And just so you know for the future, I like my double-chocolate chip cookies warm and soft in the middle ... and without magnets glued to them."
"Me, too. When you decide to bake me some, let me know.
Simone Elkeles
#86. The citizen takes his city for granted far too often. He forgets to marvel.
Carlos Fuentes
#89. 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
#91. [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
#92. 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
#93. I have two children who died before reaching 30, so who am I to complain about being alive?
Carlos Fuentes
#94. Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me.
Carlos Fuentes
#95. Do you ever lose the ego?" Westford asks me.
"Yeah." When his daughter kisses me, my ego flies out the window.
Simone Elkeles
#96. Reading, writing, teaching, learning, are all activities aimed at introducing civilizations to each other.
Carlos Fuentes
#97. I must write the book out in my head now, before I sit down.
Carlos Fuentes
#99. Did we come here to laugh or cry ? Are we dying or being born ?
Carlos Fuentes
#100. 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
