Explore Quotes by Carlos Fuentes

There must be something beyond slaughter and barbarism to support the existence of mankind and we must all help search for it.

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.

Religion is dogmatic. Politic is ideological. Reason must be logical, but literature has a privilege of being equivocal.

Reading, writing, teaching, learning, are all activities aimed at introducing civilizations to each other.

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

The new world economic order is not an exercise in philanthropy, but in enlightened self-interest for everyone concerned.

In literature, you know only what you imagine

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

Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.

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.

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.

Love can isolate us from everything around us. But in its absence, we can be filled with the fear that something comparable exists.

Writing is a struggle against silence.

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.

The great wheel of fire of ancient wisdom, silence and word engendering the myth of the origin, human action engendering the epic voyage toward the other; historical violence revealing the tragic flaw of the hero who must then return to the land of origin; myth of death and renewal and silence from which new words and images will arise, keeps on turning in spite of the blindness of purely lineal thought.

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.

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.

There is no creation without tradition; the 'new' is an inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a variation on the past.

Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate.

chaos: it has no plural.

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.