"Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre."
— Carlos Fuentes

""Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre.""
— Carlos Fuentes

"You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not to die."
— Carlos Fuentes

"chaos: it has no plural."
— 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

"Memory is satisfied desire."
— Carlos Fuentes

"I need, therefore I imagine."
— Carlos Fuentes

""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."
"
— Carlos Fuentes

"Incredible the animal that first dreamed of another animal."
— Carlos Fuentes (Terra Nostra)

"Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate."
— Carlos Fuentes (Myself with Others: Selected Essays)

"The novel is the privileged vehicle of two ways of being: narrative and freedom: to be new (novel) in a speech open to all, and to be free in a speech that never concludes."
— Carlos Fuentes (Myself with Others: Selected Essays)

"هیچ تمنایی معصومانه نیست. زیرا ما نه تنها تمنا می
کنیم بلکه این تمنا را نیز داریم که پس از دست یافتن به آنچه تمنا کرده ایم، دگرگونش کنیم"
— 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

"The logic of the symbol does not express the experiment; it is the experiment. Language is the phenomenon, and the observation of the phenomenon changes its nature."
— Carlos Fuentes (Christopher Unborn)

"Nor is the limitation of what is sayable a limit to the doable: this last is the possibility of literature."
— Carlos Fuentes (Christopher Unborn)

"Language is always the companion of Empire and Empire . . . is one Monarch and one Sword."
— Carlos Fuentes (Christopher Unborn)

"And don't give me the same old story:
"We're in Mexico. Pray."
You'd be better off taking a snake rattle."
— Carlos Fuentes (Todas Las Familias Felices)

"There is no creation without tradition; the 'new' is an inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a variation on the past."
— Carlos Fuentes (Myself with Others: Selected Essays)

"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."
— Carlos Fuentes (Myself with Others: Selected Essays)

"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."
— Carlos Fuentes (Myself with Others: Selected Essays)

"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."
— Carlos Fuentes (Myself with Others: Selected Essays)

"...desventurado país que a cada generación tiene que destruir a los antiguos poseedores y sustuirlos por nuevos amos, tan rapaces y ambiciosos como los anteriores. "
— Carlos Fuentes

"I don't think any good book is bassed on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them. "
— Carlos Fuentes

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

"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."
— Carlos Fuentes