73 Quotes by Carlos Fuentes
Carlos Fuentes, a prominent Mexican novelist and essayist, was a literary giant whose works exemplified the complexity of Mexican society and its interplay with global forces. Fuentes's writing often explored themes such as identity, history, politics, and cultural clashes.
His novel "The Death of Artemio Cruz" stands as a masterpiece of Latin American literature, utilizing innovative narrative techniques to present a multi-layered portrait of a revolutionary's life and the tumultuous history of Mexico. Fuentes's ability to intertwine historical events with personal stories captured the essence of the Latin American experience during a time of profound social and political change.
As a public intellectual, Fuentes was deeply engaged in political and cultural debates, advocating for democracy and human rights while critiquing the excesses of power. His literary contributions and his unwavering commitment to intellectual discourse have earned him international acclaim and have solidified his place as one of the most significant figures in modern Latin American literature.
Carlos Fuentes Quotes
Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre.
Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me.
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.
Writing is a struggle against silence.
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.
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.
I need, therefore I imagine.
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.
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.
Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.
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.
No government functions without the grease of corruption.
Religion is dogmatic. Politic is ideological. Reason must be logical, but literature has a privilege of being equivocal.
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.
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.
Sex without sin is like an egg without salt.
There is no creation without tradition; the 'new' is an inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a variation on the past.
The language of Mexicans springs from abysmal extremes of power and impotence, domination and resentment.
What America does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is to understand others.
Love can isolate us from everything around us. But in its absence, we can be filled with the fear that something comparable exists.
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.
Chaos: it has no plural.
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.
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.
By its very nature, the novel indicates that we are becoming. There is no final solution. There is no last word.
Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.
The Mexicans descend from the Aztecs; the Peruvians descend from the Incas; the Argentineans descend from the boats.
Reading, writing, teaching, learning, are all activities aimed at introducing civilizations to each other.
The French equate intelligence with rational discourse, the Russians with intense soul-searching. For the Mexican, intelligence is inseparable from maliciousness.
Incredible the animal that first dreamed of another animal.
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.
In Latin America, even atheists are Catholics.
Death is the great Maecenas, Death is the great angel of writing. You must write because you are not going to live any more.
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.
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.
I started my own magazine with drawings, commentary, news, film reviews and drawings.
The new world economic order is not an exercise in philanthropy, but in enlightened self-interest for everyone concerned.
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.
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.
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.
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
There must be something beyond slaughter and barbarism to support the existence of mankind and we must all help search for it.
My system for staying young is to work a lot, to always have a project on the go.
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 not interested in slice of life, what I want is a slice of the imagination.
Here among my books, my wife, my friends and my loves, I have plenty of reasons to keep living.
Memory is satisfied desire.
In the name of certainty, the greatest crimes have been committed against humanity.
The women I have loved I have desired for themselves, but also because I feared myself.
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.
I have two children who died before reaching 30, so who am I to complain about being alive?
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.
The United States condoned dictatorships in Latin America for much of the 20th century.
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!
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.
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.
There is no creation without tradition. No one creates from nothing.
To read and write is a paradise.
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.
In literature, you know only what you imagine
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.
The citizen takes his city for granted far too often. He forgets to marvel.
I always felt a little worm inside me: 'Now you need to write a novel with a woman protagonist.
I've lost audiences, I've recovered them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.
I had the good fortune of having a happy, closely knit family.
I am a literary animal. For me, everything ends in literature.
― Carlos Fuentes Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
