Quotes by Carlos Fuentes

“I dont think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.”

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

“Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.”

“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: Lets all go to bed wearing the perfume we like best.”

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

“Human kind will prevail. And it will prevail because, in spite of the reaction of history, novels tell that art restores right in us that was disregarded by history. History is being what was, then literature offers what history has not always been,”

“I wrote it to show that not all mother-in-laws are bad.”

“It was pretty impressive to score that high without our top individual. The rest of the girls really came through. Im proud of them.”

“They were determined. I tell them that beam, more than anything, is just mental. Its just a matter of executing.”

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.

Cristo quería a los justos, habitaba las buenas conciencias, pertenecía a los hombres de bien, a la gente decente, a las buenas reputaciones. ¡Que cargara el diablo con los humildes, con los pecadores, con los abandonados, con los rebeldes, con los miserables, con los que quedaban al margen del orden aceptado!

I dalje verujem da Sunce izlazi svakoga dana i da svako novo Sunce najavljuje novi dan;dan koji je juče bio budućnost. I dalje verujem da će današnji dan, u trenutku zatvaranja jedne stranice vremena, obećati sutra – ranije nepredvidivo, kasnije neponovljivo

One wants to tell a story, like Scheherezade, in order not to die. Its one of the oldest urges in mankind. Its a way of stalling death.

Dont classify me, read me. Im a writer, not a genre.

The novel is the privileged vehicle of two ways of being: narrative and freedom: to be new (novel) in a speech open to all, and to be free in a speech that never concludes.

Power does not alter a mans character. It merely reveals it.

all that was left to me was certain images and all of them spoke to me of the collapse of a cruel world and the slow construction in its stead of another world, equally cruel.

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.

Nor is the limitation of what is sayable a limit to the doable: this last is the possibility of literature.

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.