Top 102 Quotes & Sayings by Carlos Fuentes

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes.

Last updated on November 3, 2024.

Carlos Fuentes Macías was a Mexican novelist and essayist. Among his works are The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), Aura (1962), Terra Nostra (1975), The Old Gringo (1985) and Christopher Unborn (1987). In his obituary, The New York Times described Fuentes as "one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world" and an important influence on the Latin American Boom, the "explosion of Latin American literature in the 1960s and '70s", while The Guardian called him "Mexico's most celebrated novelist". His many literary honors include the Miguel de Cervantes Prize as well as Mexico's highest award, the Belisario Domínguez Medal of Honor (1999). He was often named as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, though he never won.

Mexican - Novelist | November 11, 1929 - May 15, 2012

Source: Wikipedia

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

Carlos Fuentes

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

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

Cuba needs a dose of perestroika.

Carlos Fuentes

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

Carlos Fuentes

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

Carlos Fuentes

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

The real bombs are my books, not me.

Carlos Fuentes

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

Carlos Fuentes

I have no literary fears.

Carlos Fuentes

I'm a writer, not a genre.

Carlos Fuentes

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

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

Carlos Fuentes

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

Carlos Fuentes

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

Carlos Fuentes

I love having critics for breakfast.

Carlos Fuentes

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

My system for staying young is to work a lot, to always have a project on the go.

Carlos Fuentes

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

Carlos Fuentes

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

Carlos Fuentes

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

Carlos Fuentes

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

Carlos Fuentes

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

Carlos Fuentes

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

Carlos Fuentes

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

Like all of Latin America, Mexico after independence in 1821 turned its back on a triple heritage: on the Spanish heritage, because we were newly liberated colonies, and on our Indian and black heritages, because we considered them backward and barbaric. We looked towards France, England and the U.S., to become progressive democratic republics.

Carlos Fuentes

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

Carlos Fuentes

Don't classify me, read me.

Carlos Fuentes

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

Carlos Fuentes

Work is what saves you.

Carlos Fuentes

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

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

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

Carlos Fuentes

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

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

Carlos Fuentes

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

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

Carlos Fuentes

Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.

Carlos Fuentes

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

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.

Carlos Fuentes

In Latin America, even atheists are Catholics.

Carlos Fuentes

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

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

Carlos Fuentes

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

Carlos Fuentes

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.

Carlos Fuentes

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

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.

Carlos Fuentes

Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre.

Carlos Fuentes

No government functions without the grease of corruption.

Carlos Fuentes

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

Carlos Fuentes

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

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

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

Carlos Fuentes

I need, therefore I imagine.

Carlos Fuentes

I am a Mexican. The United States lived seventy-five years with the one party system in Mexico - the PRI - without batting an eyelid, never demanding democracy of Mexico. Democracy came because Mexicans fought for democracy and made a democracy out of our history, our possibilities, our perspectives. Democracy is not something that can be exported like Coca-Cola. It has to be bred from the inside, according to the culture, the conditions of each country.

Carlos Fuentes

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

Writing is a struggle against silence.

Carlos Fuentes

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

Carlos Fuentes

Reading, writing, teaching, learning, are all activities aimed at introducing civilizations to each other.

Carlos Fuentes

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

Carlos Fuentes