Quotes from Carlos Fuentes

I love having critics for breakfast.

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

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

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

I'm a writer, not a genre.

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

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

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 don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

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.

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.

Writing is a struggle against silence.

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.

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.

I am not interested in slice of life, what I want is a slice of the imagination.

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

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

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

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

Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.

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.

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