Carlos Fuentes

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Carlos Fuentes in 2002

Carlos Fuentes Macías (November 11, 1928May 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[edit]

  • 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.
  • 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.

Quotes about Carlos Fuentes[edit]

  • 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.

External links[edit]

Wikipedia
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