Carlos Fuentes quotes

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)
What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others.
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
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
[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
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
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
The new world economic order is not an exercise in philanthropy, but in enlightened self-interest for everyone concerned.
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
Can you imagine me coming to this country to blow up a post office? I told them, "My bombs are my books." (Carlos Fuentes)
The North American world blinds us with its energy; we cannot see ourselves, we must see you.
Carlos Fuentes
The facade of the Conquest, severe yet jocund, with one foot in the dead Old World and the other in the New.
Carlos Fuentes
A tropical Mussolini.
Carlos Fuentes
I am not interested in slice of life, what I want is a slice of the imagination.
Carlos Fuentes
Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.
Carlos Fuentes
Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.
Carlos Fuentes
In Latin America, even atheists are Catholics.
Carlos Fuentes
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.
Carlos Fuentes
chaos: it has no plural.
Carlos Fuentes
Here among my books, my wife, my friends and my loves, I have plenty of reasons to keep living. (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
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
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