Carlos Fuentes Quotes

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Carlos Fuentes

Profession : Novelist

Birth : November 11, 1929

In Latin America, even atheists are Catholics.

Carlos Fuentes

I have no literary fears.

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

I have two children who died before reaching 30, so who am I to complain about being alive?

Carlos Fuentes

I always felt a little worm inside me: 'Now you need to write a novel with a woman protagonist.'

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 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

U.S. foreign policy is Manichaean. It's like a Hollywood movie. You have to know who has the white hat and who has the black hat and then go against the black hat.

Carlos Fuentes

The United States condoned dictatorships in Latin America for much of the 20th century.

Carlos Fuentes

I must write the book out in my head now, before I sit down.

Carlos Fuentes

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

Carlos Fuentes

I love having critics for breakfast.

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

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

Carlos Fuentes

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

Carlos Fuentes

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

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

The historical problem of the United States is to admit that it is a multiracial and multi-ethnic nation.

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

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