I discovered very quickly that criticism is a form of optimism, and that when you are silent about the shortcomings of your society, you're very pessimistic about that society. And it's only when you speak truthfully about it that you show your faith in that society.

Carlos Fuentes

Categorized in : Criticism Optimistic Optimism

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

Carlos Fuentes

genre

Art gives life to what history killed. Art gives voice to what history denied, silenced, or persecuted. Art brings truth to the lies of history.

Carlos Fuentes

voice lying art

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

Carlos Fuentes

separation connections culture

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.

Carlos Fuentes

black white writing

Writing is a struggle against silence.

Carlos Fuentes

struggle beautiful life

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

Carlos Fuentes

migration diversity like-you

I need, therefore I imagine.

Carlos Fuentes

imagine writing needs

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.

Carlos Fuentes

stories writing order

No government functions without the grease of corruption.

Carlos Fuentes

grease corruption government

In a world torn by every kind of fundamentalism - religious, ethnic, nationalist and tribal - we must grant first place to economic fundamentalism, with its religious conviction that the market, left to its own devices, is capable of resolving all our problems. This faith has its own ayatollahs. Its church is neo-liberalism; its creed is profit; its prayers are for monopolies.

Carlos Fuentes

church religious prayer

Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.

Carlos Fuentes

opportunity giving history

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

Carlos Fuentes

dies ends writing

Reading, writing, teaching, learning, are all activities aimed at introducing civilizations to each other.

Carlos Fuentes

reading teaching writing

You have an absolute freedom in Mexican writing today in which you dont 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.

Carlos Fuentes

mexican writing mean

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

Carlos Fuentes

variation novelty past

Religion is dogmatic. Politic is ideological. Reason must be logical, but literature has a privilege of being equivocal.

Carlos Fuentes

privilege literature reason

You, yesterday, did the usual things, just as any day, You don't know if it's worth remembering. You would prefer to remember, there lying in the half-darkness of the bedroom, not what has happened already but what is going to happen. In your half-darkness your eyes would prefer to look ahead, not behind, and they do not know how to foresee the past.

Carlos Fuentes

eye lying past

I am a Mexican. The United States lived seventy-five years with the one party system in Mexico - the PRI - without batting an eyelid, never demanding democracy of Mexico. Democracy came because Mexicans fought for democracy and made a democracy out of our history, our possibilities, our perspectives. Democracy is not something that can be exported like Coca-Cola. It has to be bred from the inside, according to the culture, the conditions of each country.

Carlos Fuentes

perspective party country

Retrospectively, I would agree with Luis Bunuel that sex without sin is like an egg without salt.

Carlos Fuentes

salt eggs sex

The language of Mexicans springs from abysmal extremes of power and impotence, domination and resentment.

Carlos Fuentes

resentment language spring