Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes in 2002

Carlos Fuentes Macías (November 11, 1928 – May 15, 2012) was a Mexican novelist, short-story writer, essayist, playwright and critic. He taught in several American and British universities, and served as his country’s ambassador to France.

Quotes

• The facade of the Conquest, severe yet jocund, with one foot in the dead Old World and the other in the New.
  • Describing a Mexican baroque church
  • The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962)

• What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others.
  • "To See Ourselves as Others See Us", in Time, June 16, 1986.

• The North American world blinds us with its energy; we cannot see ourselves, we must see you.
  • "How I Started to Write", in Rick Simonson and Scott Walker (eds.) The Graywolf Annual Five: Multi-Cultural Literacy (St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1988); cited from Myself With Others (London: Pan, 1989) p. 5.

• Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre.
  • "How I Started to Write", in Rick Simonson and Scott Walker (eds.) The Graywolf Annual Five: Multi-Cultural Literacy (St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1988); cited from Myself With Others (London: Pan, 1989) p. 27.

• 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.
  • "Doing It Our Way", New Statesman & Society, 2 February 1990, tr. Alfred MacAdam

• 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.
  • As quoted in International Herald Tribune (Paris, 5 November 1991)

• No government functions without the grease of corruption.
  • La Silla del Águila (The Eagle's Throne) (2003)

• [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.
  • Quoted in Anne-Marie O'Connor, "Novelist Carlos Fuentes confronts mortality and his country's future", Los Angeles Times, 26 April 2006

• Can you imagine me coming to this country to blow up a post office? I told them, "My bombs are my books."
  • About being denied a visa to the United States in the early 1960s after he praised the Cuban Revolution; as quoted by Anne-Marie O'Connor, "Novelist Carlos Fuentes confronts mortality and his country's future", Los Angeles Times, 26 April 2006

• A tropical Mussolini
  • Describing Hugo Chavez
  • Quoted in The Economist, 19 May 2012, p. 90

Quotes about Carlos Fuentes

• I was influenced by all of them-by García Márquez, by [[Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, so many of them-some of my own generation, like Eduardo Galeano. It's easy for me to write because I don't have to invent anything. They already found a voice, a way of telling us to ourselves, so it's easy.
  • 1994 interview in Conversations with Isabel Allende (1999)

• I admire him a lot. He has done a lot to bring the Latin American situation to the American consciousness.
  • Rosario Ferré interview in Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out by Donna Marie Perry (1993)

• Cortázar is the one who is closest to my way of understanding the act of writing. And nearer to my heart. I admire Carlos Fuentes on the opposite extreme of the equation. That is why I wrote a book on both of them, Entrecruzamientos: Cortázar/Fuentes.
  • Luisa Valenzuela Interview (2018)