I believe in books that do not go to a ready-made public. I’m looking for readers I would like to make. To win them, to create readers rather than to give something that readers are expecting. That would bore me to death. – Carlos Fuentes
Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers. – Carlos Fuentes
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. – Carlos Fuentes
What’s happened at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq is one of the grossest violations of human rights under the Geneva Conventions that we have record of. It is simply monstrous. – Carlos Fuentes
There are now 30-year-old Mexican writers who do great novels in which Mexico isn’t even mentioned. – Carlos Fuentes
Contrary to the macho culture of Mexico, both my grandmothers were very brave young widows. I was always very close to these hard-working, intelligent women. – Carlos Fuentes
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
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. – Carlos Fuentes
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. – Carlos Fuentes
What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others. – Carlos Fuentes
The United States has written the white history of the United States. It now needs to write the black, Latino, Indian, Asian and Caribbean history of the United States. – Carlos Fuentes
The United States condoned dictatorships in Latin America for much of the 20th century. – Carlos Fuentes
There must be something beyond slaughter and barbarism to support the existence of mankind and we must all help search for it. – Carlos Fuentes
The historical problem of the United States is to admit that it is a multiracial and multi-ethnic nation. – Carlos Fuentes
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. – Carlos Fuentes
What I want is to respond to the challenge posed by the mass media – to permit the novel to say what can only be said by narrative – to allow it to be itself. – Carlos Fuentes
Writing requires the concentration of the writer, demands that nothing else be done except that. – Carlos Fuentes
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. – Carlos Fuentes
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. – Carlos Fuentes
The new world economic order is not an exercise in philanthropy, but in enlightened self-interest for everyone concerned. – Carlos Fuentes
