Carlos Fuentes

“Powiedział, że Hiszpania dla Hiszpanów jest tym, czym Meksyk dla Meksykanów - bolesną obsesją. Dla nich Ojczyzna nie jest, jak dla Amerykanów, hymnem optymizmu ani, jak dla Anglików, flegmatycznym żartem, ani też, jak dla Rosjan, sentymentalnym szaleństwem, lub, jak dla Francuzów, racjonalną ironią, czy - jak dla Niemców - agresywnym rozkazem, ale konfliktem dwóch połówek, dwóch przeciwstawnych części, dzieleniem duszy na kawałki, Hiszpania, Meksyk, kraje słońca i cienia.”

“And don't give me the same old story:"We're in Mexico. Pray."You'd be better off taking a snake rattle.”

“Writing is a struggle against silence.”

“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. ”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The novel is the privileged vehicle of two ways of being: narrative and freedom: to be new (novel) in a speech open to all, and to be free in a speech that never concludes.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“Language is always the companion of Empire and Empire . . . is one Monarch and one Sword.”

“Nor is the limitation of what is sayable a limit to the doable: this last is the possibility of literature.”

“The logic of the symbol does not express the experiment; it is the experiment. Language is the phenomenon, and the observation of the phenomenon changes its nature.”

“chaos: it has no plural.”

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

“...desventurado país que a cada generación tiene que destruir a los antiguos poseedores y sustuirlos por nuevos amos, tan rapaces y ambiciosos como los anteriores. ”

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

“I need, therefore I imagine.”

“Memory is satisfied desire.”

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

“You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not to die.”