Explore Quotes by Carlos Fuentes

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.

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.

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

Under the veneer of Westernization, the cultures of the Indian world - which have existed for 30,000 years! - continue to live. Sometimes in a magical way, sometimes in the shadows.

The United States is very good at understanding itself, and very bad at understanding others.

I like fighting. I get into rows all the time.

The historical problem of the United States is to admit that it is a multiracial and multi-ethnic nation.

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

I started my own magazine with drawings, commentary, news, film reviews and drawings.

In Latin America, even atheists are Catholics.

Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.

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

Memory is satisfied desire.

Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre.

I’ve been thrashed by the critics. I love having critics for breakfast. I’ve been having them for 30 years in Mexico - just eating them like chicken and then throwing the bones away. They have not survived, I have!

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.

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

In a world torn by every kind of fundamentalism - religious, ethnic, nationalist and tribal - we must grant first place to economic fundamentalism, with its religious conviction that the market, left to its own devices, is capable of resolving all our problems. This faith has its own ayatollahs. Its church is neo-liberalism; its creed is profit; its prayers are for monopolies.

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

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