“She begins to feel that the reality show is the university she never attended. Vicarious reality. Emotion without a value-added tax. Movement without danger. Alma finds her reality. She no longer has a reason to put herself at risk and go out into the hostile, degrading world.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Marco Polo had been to China; Vasco de Gama had discovered the route to the Cape. The continent was in ferment, in movement, whereas the Mexican world was … absolutely hermetically closed. The arrival of the Spaniards must have been like the arrival of people from Mars... totally unsuspected aliens. The shock must have been profound…I think it’s one of the reasons behind the downfall of the Aztec Empire. In a sense, I think the Aztec Empire died of astonishment, more than anything else.”

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

“What is the strongest pretext for loving?...If it is necessary, our atomized consciousness invents love, imagines it or feigns it, but does not live without it, since in the midst of infinite dispersion, love, even if as a pretext , gives us the measure of our loss.”