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

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

“Writing is a struggle against silence.”
― 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

“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

“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

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

“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

“Memory is satisfied desire.”
― 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, Myself with Others: Selected Essays

“Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Myself with Others: Selected Essays

“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

“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

“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

“No volverás a mirar tu reloj, ese objeto inservible que mide falsamente el tiempo acordado a la vanidad humana, esas manecillas que marcan tediosamente las largas horas inventadas para engañar el verdadero tiempo, el tiempo que corre con la velocidad insultante, mortal, que ningún reloj puede medir. Una vida, un siglo, cincuenta años: ya no te será posible imaginar esas medidas mentirosas, ya no te será posible tomar entre las manos ese polvo sin cuerpo.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Aura

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

“Le démon aussi était un ange, avant...”
― Carlos Fuentes, Aura

“¿Explicarlo? No -se dijo- , creerlo, nada más. México no se explica; en México se cree, con furia, con pasión, con desaliento.”
― Carlos Fuentes, La región más transparente

“El cielo no es alto ni bajo. Está encima y debajo de nosotros al mismo tiempo.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Aura

“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

“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

“Did you know we know we are all the object of another's imagination?”
― Carlos Fuentes, The Old Gringo

“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

“...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

“Perdiste tu inocencia en el mundo de afuera. No podrás recuperarla aquí adentro, en el mundo de los afectos. Quizá tuviste tu jardín. Yo también tuve el mío, mi pequeño paraíso. Ahora ambos lo hemos perdido. Trata de recordar. No puedes encontrar en mí lo que ya sacrificaste, lo que ya perdiste para siempre y por tu propia obra. No sé de dónde vienes. No sé qué has hecho. Sólo sé que en tu vida perdiste lo que después me hiciste perder a mí: el sueño, la inocencia. Ya nunca seremos los mismos.”
― Carlos Fuentes, La muerte de Artemio Cruz

“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.”
― Carlos Fuentes

“Originality' is the sickness of modernity that wishes to see itself as something new, always new, in order continually to witness its own birth. In doing so, modernity is that fashionable illusion which only speaks to death”
― Carlos Fuentes, Aura

“Si, soy un utopista. Muero soñando que la sociedad debe ser gobernada por hombres de cultura, bondad y buen gusto.”
― Carlos Fuentes, The Eagle's Throne