Carlos Fuentes Quotes - Page 2

chaos: it has no plural.

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.

Incredible the animal that first dreamed of another animal.

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.

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; the 'new' is an inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a variation on the past.

In Latin America, even atheists are Catholics.

The language of Mexicans springs from abysmal extremes of power and impotence, domination and resentment.

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.

What America does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is to understand others.

I am a Mexican. The United States lived seventy-five years with the one party system in Mexico - the PRI - without batting an eyelid, never demanding democracy of Mexico. Democracy came because Mexicans fought for democracy and made a democracy out of our history, our possibilities, our perspectives. Democracy is not something that can be exported like Coca-Cola. It has to be bred from the inside, according to the culture, the conditions of each country.

The Mexicans descend from the Aztecs; the Peruvians descend from the Incas; the Argentineans descend from the boats.

Here among my books, my wife, my friends and my loves, I have plenty of reasons to keep living.

To read and write is a paradise.

In the name of certainty, the greatest crimes have been committed against humanity.

Death is the great Maecenas, Death is the great angel of writing. You must write because you are not going to live any more.

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.

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.

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.

The women I have loved I have desired for themselves, but also because I feared myself.

By its very nature, the novel indicates that we are becoming. There is no final solution. There is no last word.

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 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.

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.