76+ Carlos Fuentes Quotes On Education, Fiction And Politics

Carlos Fuentes was a Mexican novelist, essayist, and diplomat. He was one of the most influential authors of the Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 70s and a key figure in the Latin American literary movement of the same period. He was best known for his novel The Old Gringo, which was made into a film starring Gregory Peck in 1989. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Carlos Fuentes on education, life, love.

Top 10 Carlos Fuentes Quotes

1. Writing is a struggle against silence.
2. Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me.
3. I need, therefore I imagine.
4. Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.
5. No government functions without the grease of corruption.
6. Religion is dogmatic. Politic is ideological. Reason must be logical, but literature has a privilege of being equivocal.
7. There is no creation without tradition; the 'new' is an inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a variation on the past.
8. The language of Mexicans springs from abysmal extremes of power and impotence, domination and resentment.
9. 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.
10. 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 Image Quotes

Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me. — Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes Short Quotes

• Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.
• My system for staying young is to work a lot, to always have a project on the go.
• I am not interested in slice of life, what I want is a slice of the imagination.
• I had the good fortune of having a happy, closely knit family.
• The United States condoned dictatorships in Latin America for much of the 20th century.
• At 50 I find there is a long line of characters and shapes demanding words just outside my window.
• I use a lot of film images, analogies, and imagination.
• Incredible the animal that first dreamed of another animal.
• In Latin America, even atheists are Catholics.
• chaos: it has no plural.

Carlos Fuentes Quotes About Love

Here among my books, my wife, my friends and my loves, I have plenty of reasons to keep living. — Carlos Fuentes

The women I have loved I have desired for themselves, but also because I feared myself. — Carlos Fuentes

I’ve been thrashed by the critics. I love having critics for breakfast. I’ve been having them for 30 years in Mexico - just eating them like chicken and then throwing the bones away. They have not survived, I have! — 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

Carlos Fuentes Quotes About Writing

You have an absolute freedom in Mexican writing today in which you dont 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

Reading, writing, teaching, learning, are all activities aimed at introducing civilizations to each other. — 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 shes had a fight with the secretary; exports and imports; students in trouble; thumbtacks for the embassy. — 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

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

You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not to die. — Carlos Fuentes

Mexico is a very complex, mysterious country. I will never understand it fully, and that's why I write so much about it, in order to try to understand it. — Carlos Fuentes

To read and write is a paradise. — Carlos Fuentes

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

In literature, you know only what you imagine — Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes Famous Quotes And Sayings

Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me. — 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

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

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

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

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

Children know how to be cruel, and the cruelty of their elders is the surest residue of the malaise the young feel toward things strange, things other, things that reveal our own ignorance or insufficiency — 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

I have never considered myself a writer in exile because I grew up outside of my own country, because my father was a diplomat. Therefore, I grew up in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, the United States, I studied in Switzerland - so I've always had perspective on my country - I am thankful for that. — Carlos Fuentes

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

Now the masses of Latin America are electing governments they feel can take forward the democratic reforms of the last 20 years, and transform them into social and economic reforms. This is, I think, extremely important, because it also means that the left has abandoned the revolutionary solution proposed by Che Guevara and has taken the democratic path. — Carlos Fuentes

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

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

I like fighting. I get into rows all the time. — Carlos Fuentes

Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate. — Carlos Fuentes

I've lost audiences, I've recovered them. — Carlos Fuentes

Retrospectively, I would agree with Luis Bunuel that sex without sin is like an egg without salt. — 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

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

The citizen takes his city for granted far too often. He forgets to marvel. — Carlos Fuentes

Memory is satisfied desire. — Carlos Fuentes

I have no literary fears. — 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

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

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

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

The United States still thinks that Mexico is a nineteenth century industrial society. It isn't that any longer, it has to adapt to a new reality. But we have a grave responsibility in Mexico, which is to give work to our own people. As long as we have a system that denies work to 50 percent of the population, you'll have immigrants coming to the United States. — Carlos Fuentes

What America does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is to understand others. — Carlos Fuentes

For me, life without literature is inconceivable. I think that Don Quixote in a physical sense never existed, but Don Quixote exists more than anybody who existed in 1605. Much more. There's nobody who can compete with Don Quixote or with Hamlet. So in the end we have the reality of the book as the reality of the world and the reality of history. — Carlos Fuentes

The Mexicans descend from the Aztecs; the Peruvians descend from the Incas; the Argentineans descend from the boats. — 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

There is no creation without tradition. No one creates from nothing. — Carlos Fuentes

In the name of certainty, the greatest crimes have been committed against humanity. — Carlos Fuentes

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. — Carlos Fuentes

Some writers achieve great popularity and then disappear forever. The bestseller lists of the past fifty years are, with a few lively exceptions, a sombre graveyard of dead books. — Carlos Fuentes

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. — Carlos Fuentes

I am a literary animal. For me, everything ends in literature. — Carlos Fuentes

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

I started my own magazine with drawings, commentary, news, film reviews and drawings. — Carlos Fuentes

In a world torn by every kind of fundamentalism - religious, ethnic, nationalist and tribal - we must grant first place to economic fundamentalism, with its religious conviction that the market, left to its own devices, is capable of resolving all our problems. This faith has its own ayatollahs. Its church is neo-liberalism; its creed is profit; its prayers are for monopolies. — Carlos Fuentes

Life Lessons by Carlos Fuentes

1. Carlos Fuentes teaches us to be open-minded and to embrace different cultures and perspectives. He encourages us to take risks and to be brave enough to stand up for our beliefs.
2. He also reminds us to be mindful of our actions and to think about the consequences of our decisions. He emphasizes the importance of understanding our own identity and the power of storytelling.
3. Finally, Fuentes encourages us to be compassionate and to show empathy towards others, no matter their background or experiences. He reminds us that we are all connected and that our actions have an impact on the world around us.