Top 70 Carlos Fuentes Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Writing is a struggle against silence.”

— Carlos Fuentes

2. “Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me.”

— Carlos Fuentes

3. “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

4. “In Latin America, even atheists are Catholics.”

— Carlos Fuentes

5. “Don’t classify me, read me. I’m a writer, not a genre.”

— Carlos Fuentes

6. “Memory is satisfied desire.”

— Carlos Fuentes

7. “Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate.”

— Carlos Fuentes

8. “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

9. “What America does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is to understand others.”

— Carlos Fuentes

10. “Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.”

— Carlos Fuentes

11. “The Mexicans descend from the Aztecs; the Peruvians descend from the Incas; the Argentineans descend from the boats.”

— Carlos Fuentes

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

— Carlos Fuentes

13. “In the name of certainty, the greatest crimes have been committed against humanity.”

— Carlos Fuentes

14. “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

15. “I need, therefore I imagine.”

— Carlos Fuentes

16. “Incredible the animal that first dreamed of another animal.”

— Carlos Fuentes

17. “Here among my books, my wife, my friends and my loves, I have plenty of reasons to keep living.”

— Carlos Fuentes

18. “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.”

— Carlos Fuentes

19. “Reading, writing, teaching, learning, are all activities aimed at introducing civilizations to each other.”

— Carlos Fuentes

Featured in: Reading Quotes

20. “Yo no soy mexicano. Yo no soy gringo. Yo no soy chicano. No soy gringo en USA y mexicano en Mexico. Soy chicano en todas partes. No tengo que asimilarme a nada. Tengo mi propia historia.”

— Carlos Fuentes

21. “There is no creation without tradition. No one creates from nothing.”

— Carlos Fuentes

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

— Carlos Fuentes

23. “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

24. “There is no creation without tradition; the ‘new’ is an inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a variation on the past.”

— Carlos Fuentes

25. “Death is the great Maecenas, Death is the great angel of writing. You must write because you are not going to live any more.”

— Carlos Fuentes

26. “Myth is a past with a future, exercising itself in the present.”

— Carlos Fuentes

27. “One wants to tell a story, like Scheherezade, in order not to die. It’s one of the oldest urges in mankind. It’s a way of stalling death.”

— Carlos Fuentes

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Carlos Fuentes

29. “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

30. “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

31. “Hay que morir antes de renacer.”

— Carlos Fuentes

32. “I discovered very quickly that criticism is a form of optimism, and that when you are silent about the shortcomings of your society, you’re very pessimistic about that society. And it’s only when you speak truthfully about it that you show your faith in that society.”

— Carlos Fuentes

33. “I am a literary animal. For me, everything ends in literature.”

— Carlos Fuentes

34. “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

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

— Carlos Fuentes

36. “Sentado en la cama, tratas de distinguir el origen de esa luz difusa, opalina, que apens te permite separa los objetos, la presencia de Aura, de la atmosfera dorada que los envuelve.”

— Carlos Fuentes

37. “Vivir es traicionar a tu Dios; cada acto de la vida, cada acto que nos afirma como seres vivos, exige que se violen los mandamientos de tu Dios.”

— Carlos Fuentes

38. “Cuba needs a dose of perestroika.”

— Carlos Fuentes

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

— Carlos Fuentes

40. “The French equate intelligence with rational discourse, the Russians with intense soul-searching. For the Mexican, intelligence is inseparable from maliciousness.”

— Carlos Fuentes

41. “No government functions without the grease of corruption.”

— Carlos Fuentes

42. “I live through risk. Without risk there is no art. You should always be on the edge of a cliff about to fall down and break your neck.”

— Carlos Fuentes

43. “All truth is double, and perhaps multiple; absolute reason is as dangerous as absolute faith; reason also has its madness.”

— Carlos Fuentes

44. “I had the good fortune of having a happy, closely knit family.”

— Carlos Fuentes

45. “The women I have loved I have desired for themselves, but also because I feared myself.”

— Carlos Fuentes

46. “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

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

— Carlos Fuentes

48. “I love having critics for breakfast.”

— Carlos Fuentes

49. “One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.”

— Carlos Fuentes

50. “There must be something beyond slaughter and barbarism to support the existence of mankind and we must all help search for it.”

— Carlos Fuentes