Carlos Fuentes
Carlos Fuentes
Carlos Fuentes Macías audio was a Mexican novelist and essayist. Among his works are The Death of Artemio Cruz, Aura, Terra Nostra, The Old Gringoand Christopher Unborn. In his obituary, the New York Times described him as "one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world" and an important influence on the Latin American Boom, the "explosion of Latin American literature in the 1960s and '70s", while The Guardian called him "Mexico's most celebrated novelist". His many literary honors include...
NationalityMexican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth11 November 1928
CityPanama City, Panama
CountryMexico
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.
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 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.
Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate.
Memory is satisfied desire.
In the name of certainty, the greatest crimes have been committed against humanity.
For me, life without literature is inconceivable. I think that Don Quixote in a physical sense never existed, but Don Quixote exists more than anybody who existed in 1605. Much more. There's nobody who can compete with Don Quixote or with Hamlet. So in the end we have the reality of the book as the reality of the world and the reality of history.
Here among my books, my wife, my friends and my loves, I have plenty of reasons to keep living.
I had the good fortune of having a happy, closely knit family.
Reading, writing, teaching, learning, are all activities aimed at introducing civilizations to each other.
There is no creation without tradition. No one creates from nothing.
Children know how to be cruel, and the cruelty of their elders is the surest residue of the malaise the young feel toward things strange, things other, things that reveal our own ignorance or insufficiency
I love having critics for breakfast