Carlos Fuentes > Quotes

“I need, therefore I imagine.”
― 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

“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

“Writing is a struggle against silence.”
― 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

“chaos: it has no plural.”
― Carlos Fuentes

“Yo no soy mexicano. Yo no soy gringo. Yo no soy chicano. No soy gringo en USA y mexicano en Mexico. Soy chicano en todas partes. No tengo que asimilarme a nada. Tengo mi propia historia.”
― Carlos Fuentes

“Memory is satisfied desire.”
― Carlos Fuentes

“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

“Love can isolate us from everything around us. But in its absence, we can be filled with the fear that something comparable exists.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Todas Las Familias Felices

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

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

“Incredible the animal that first dreamed of another animal.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra

“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.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Todas Las Familias Felices

“I discovered very quickly that 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.”
― Carlos Fuentes

“La muerte espera al más valiente, al más rico, al más bello. Pero los iguala al más cobarde, al más pobre, al más feo, no en el simple hecho de morir, ni siquiera en la conciencia de la muerte, sino en la ignorancia de la muerte. Sabemos que un día vendrá, pero nunca sabemos lo que es.”
― 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, 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

“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

“She begins to feel that the reality show is the university she never attended. Vicarious reality. Emotion without a value-added tax. Movement without danger. Alma finds her reality. She no longer has a reason to put herself at risk and go out into the hostile, degrading world.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Todas Las Familias Felices

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

“Te pido, tan solo, que veas en ese gran
amor que dices tenerme algo suficiente, algo que pueda llenarnos a los dos sin
necesidad de recurrir a la imaginación enfermiza.”
― Carlos Fuentes

“Alessandra approached the geniuses of the past to give them life with her attention, which was the form her affection took: paying attention.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Todas Las Familias Felices

“Deja que toda tu nostalgia emigre, todos tus cabos sueltos; comienza, todos los días en el parto.”
― Carlos Fuentes

“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

“I dalje verujem da Sunce izlazi svakoga dana i da svako novo Sunce najavljuje novi dan;dan koji je juče bio budućnost. I dalje verujem da će današnji dan, u trenutku zatvaranja jedne stranice vremena, obećati sutra – ranije nepredvidivo, kasnije neponovljivo”
― Carlos Fuentes

“Powiedział, że Hiszpania dla Hiszpanów jest tym, czym Meksyk dla Meksykanów - bolesną obsesją. Dla nich Ojczyzna nie jest, jak dla Amerykanów, hymnem optymizmu ani, jak dla Anglików, flegmatycznym żartem, ani też, jak dla Rosjan, sentymentalnym szaleństwem, lub, jak dla Francuzów, racjonalną ironią, czy - jak dla Niemców - agresywnym rozkazem, ale konfliktem dwóch połówek, dwóch przeciwstawnych części, dzieleniem duszy na kawałki, Hiszpania, Meksyk, kraje słońca i cienia.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Lata z Laurą Diaz

“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

“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.”
― Carlos Fuentes