Carlos Fuentes

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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 real bombs are my books, not me.”

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

“Cuba needs a dose of perestroika.”

“I have no literary fears.”

“I've lost audiences, I've recovered them.”

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

“You have an absolute freedom in Mexican writing today in which you don't 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.”

“Work is what saves you.”

“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.”

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

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

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