Carlos Fuentes quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Carlos Fuentes on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

The real bombs are my books, not me.

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.

I love having critics for breakfast.

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

Finished, the book begins.

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

I have no literary fears.

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

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

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.

Did you know we know we are all the object of another's imagination?

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

You will wish and not wish to see.

Memory is satisfied desire.

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

Cuba needs a dose of perestroika.

Language is always the companion of Empire and Empire ... is one Monarch and one Sword.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't classify me, read me.

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

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

Incredible the animal that first dreamed of another animal.

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

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

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

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

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.

No government functions without the grease of corruption.

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

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

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

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

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

Chaos: it has no plural.

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

In Latin America, even atheists are Catholics.

I'm a writer, not a genre.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writing is a struggle against silence.

In literature, you know only what you imagine

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

Work is what saves you.