Carlos Fuentes Quotes

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

I am an artist. The pleasure of the flesh robs strength from my artistic vocation, I prefer to feel my sexual juices flow toward a painting, wash over it, fertilize it, realize it; the delights of the flesh castrate me, the delights of art satisfy me.

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.

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

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.

Work is what saves you.

What I want is to respond to the challenge posed by the mass media – to permit the novel to say what can only be said by narrative – to allow it to be itself.

Under the veneer of Westernization, the cultures of the Indian world – which have existed for 30,000 years! – continue to live. Sometimes in a magical way, sometimes in the shadows.

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.

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

The United States is very good at understanding itself, and very bad at understanding others.

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.

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

The real bombs are my books, not me.

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.

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

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