Carlos Fuentes Quotes

18 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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.

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

Carlos Fuentes
New York: building itself up out of its own disintegration, its inevitable destiny as the city for everyone, energetic, tireless, brutal, murderous city of the entire world, where we all recognize ourselves and see our worst and our best.

Carlos Fuentes
If the Soviet Union can give up the Brezhnev Doctrine for the Sinatra Doctrine, the United States can give up the James Monroe Doctrine for the Marilyn Monroe Doctrine: Let's all go to bed wearing the perfume we like best.

Carlos Fuentes
No government functions without the grease of corruption.

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

Carlos Fuentes
To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.

Carlos Fuentes
High on the agenda for the 21st century will be the need to restore some kind of tragic consciousness.

Carlos Fuentes
Art gives life to what history killed. Art gives voice to what history denied, silenced, or persecuted. Art brings truth to the lies of history.

Carlos Fuentes
The North American world blinds us with its energy; we cannot see ourselves, we must see you.

Carlos Fuentes
[The Mexican revolution] was a break with the past to recover the past. We were trying to deny we had an Indian and a black and a Spanish past. The Mexican Revolution accepted all heritages. It allowed Mexico to be mestizo.

Carlos Fuentes
There are people whose external reality is generous because it is transparent, because you can read everything, accept everything, understand everything about them: people who carry their own sun with them.

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
Can you imagine me coming to this country to blow up a post office? I told them, "My bombs are my books."

Carlos Fuentes
The facade of the Conquest, severe yet jocund, with one foot in the dead Old World and the other in the New.

Carlos Fuentes