Top 102 Quotes & Sayings by Carlos Fuentes - Page 2

When we have a better, more social, more responsible, less egotistical, less corrupt system, Mexico will be able to give work to the millions of Mexicans who have to build our roads, dams, schools, all the things that are left undone in Mexico while we have the manpower. There is something very bad going on, on both sides of the border in Mexico and the US. But the worker is a worker, not a criminal. So, I am in favor of a solution such as the Kennedy-McCain proposals that make it clear what steps have to be taken to accept the fact that the US needs foreign workers.

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

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

At 50 I find there is a long line of characters and shapes demanding words just outside my window.

The Mexicans descend from the Aztecs; the Peruvians descend from the Incas; the Argentineans descend from the boats.

Mexico is a very complex, mysterious country. I will never understand it fully, and that's why I write so much about it, in order to try to understand 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Death is the great Maecenas, Death is the great angel of writing. You must write because you are not going to live any more.

Most writers in Mexico have had posts as ambassadors, secretaries - that is no longer the case. Now a writer can live off writing. He has an audience: there are publishing houses, there are newspapers - so the situation is not as terrible as it used to be when there were no means and he had to go into government service, be an ambassador or a cabinet minister, etc. So, things are changing in the sense that the civil society is now the protagonist. The writer therefore occupies a different position, but no less influential than in the past, in a new, democratic society.

Migration is an opportunity, not a problem. And in the sense that it is an opportunity, it goes on to a bilateral agreement, between Mexico and the US, the US and the Dominican Republic, whatever you wish, and it has to be a multilateral, international event. I am in favor of an international union of migrant workers that really takes on the problems that affect Europe, with the migrants coming from Africa, and the US with the migrants coming from Latin America. It has to be considered an international question, with international solutions, and with no problems national or international.

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

Memory is satisfied desire.

chaos: it has no plural.

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.

In literature, you know only what you imagine

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.

Anything would be better in the US than what you have. As a government it's really very low quality, given the fact that this country produces eminent intellectuals, has great universities, and then the people who arrive in government are very mediocre. The Latin American situation has been very different in the first place, because writers have spoken for those who have no voice. The rate of illiteracy, poverty, joblessness in Latin America has been so great throughout our history that if the writers didn't speak out for the people, nobody would.

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.

The French equate intelligence with rational discourse, the Russians with intense soul-searching. For the Mexican, intelligence is inseparable from maliciousness.

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.

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.

You have an absolute freedom in Mexican writing today in which you dont 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.

Diplomacy in a sense is the opposite of writing. You have to disperse yourself so much: the lady who comes in crying because shes had a fight with the secretary; exports and imports; students in trouble; thumbtacks for the embassy.

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.

To read and write is a paradise.

I have never considered myself a writer in exile because I grew up outside of my own country, because my father was a diplomat. Therefore, I grew up in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, the United States, I studied in Switzerland - so I've always had perspective on my country - I am thankful for that.

Incredible the animal that first dreamed of another animal.

There is no creation without tradition. No one creates from nothing.

The United States still thinks that Mexico is a nineteenth century industrial society. It isn't that any longer, it has to adapt to a new reality. But we have a grave responsibility in Mexico, which is to give work to our own people. As long as we have a system that denies work to 50 percent of the population, you'll have immigrants coming to the United States.

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

Things have changed in Latin America now. We mostly have democratic governments in Latin America, so the position of the writer has changed. It is not as Neruda used to say, that a Latin American writer walks around with the body of his people on his back. Now, we have citizens, we have public means of expression, political parties, congress, unions. So, the writer's position has changed, we now consider ourselves to be citizens - not spokespeople for everybody - but citizens that participate in the political and social process of the country.

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

There is no creation without tradition; the 'new' is an inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a variation on the past.

I’ve been thrashed by the critics. I love having critics for breakfast. I’ve been having them for 30 years in Mexico - just eating them like chicken and then throwing the bones away. They have not survived, I have!

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

Now the masses of Latin America are electing governments they feel can take forward the democratic reforms of the last 20 years, and transform them into social and economic reforms. This is, I think, extremely important, because it also means that the left has abandoned the revolutionary solution proposed by Che Guevara and has taken the democratic path.