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 must write the book out in my head now, before I sit down.
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.
Some writers achieve great popularity and then disappear forever. The bestseller lists of the past fifty years are, with a few lively exceptions, a sombre graveyard of dead books.
I believe in books that do not go to a ready-made public. I'm looking for readers I would like to make. To win them, to create readers rather than to give something that readers are expecting. That would bore me to death.
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 real bombs are my books, not me.
In Latin America, even atheists are Catholics.
At 50 I find there is a long line of characters and shapes demanding words just outside my window.
If the Soviet Union can give up the Brezhnev Doctrine for the Sinatra Doctrine, the United States can give up the James Monroe Doctrine for the Marilyn Monroe Doctrine: Let's all go to bed wearing the perfume we like best.
[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.
Contrary to the macho culture of Mexico, both my grandmothers were very brave young widows. I was always very close to these hard-working, intelligent women.
Memory is satisfied desire.
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.