Explore Quotes by Carlos Fuentes

U.S. foreign policy is Manichaean. It's like a Hollywood movie. You have to know who has the white hat and who has the black hat and then go against the black hat.

What I want is to respond to the challenge posed by the mass media - to permit the novel to say what can only be said by narrative - to allow it to be itself.

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

I have two children who died before reaching 30, so who am I to complain about being alive?

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

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

The real bombs are my books, not me.

I am a morning writer; I am writing at eight-thirty in longhand and I keep at it until twelve-thirty, when I go for a swim. Then I come back, have lunch, and read in the afternoon until I take my walk for the next day's writing.

I use a lot of film images, analogies, and imagination.

The United States condoned dictatorships in Latin America for much of the 20th century.

Writing requires the concentration of the writer, demands that nothing else be done except that.

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'm a writer, not a genre.

I love having critics for breakfast.

I have no literary fears.

My system for staying young is to work a lot, to always have a project on the go.

Contrary to the macho culture of Mexico, both my grandmothers were very brave young widows. I was always very close to these hard-working, intelligent women.

One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.

I am a literary animal. For me, everything ends in literature.

I must write the book out in my head now, before I sit down.

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.