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.
I need, therefore I imagine.
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.
Reading, writing, teaching, learning, are all activities aimed at introducing civilizations to each other.
In literature, you know only what you imagine
You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not to die.
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.
To read and write is a paradise.
Death is the great Maecenas, Death is the great angel of writing. You must write because you are not going to live any more.
Most writers in Mexico have had posts as ambassadors, secretaries - that is no longer the case. Now a writer can live off writing. He has an audience: there are publishing houses, there are newspapers - so the situation is not as terrible as it used to be when there were no means and he had to go into government service, be an ambassador or a cabinet minister, etc. So, things are changing in the sense that the civil society is now the protagonist. The writer therefore occupies a different position, but no less influential than in the past, in a new, democratic society.
Mexico is a very complex, mysterious country. I will never understand it fully, and that's why I write so much about it, in order to try to understand it.
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.
I always felt a little worm inside me: 'Now you need to write a novel with a woman protagonist.
One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.
I must write the book out in my head now, before I sit down.
