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

Carlos Fuentes

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Carlos Fuentes
Age: 83 †
Born: 1928
Born: November 11
Died: 2012
Died: May 15
Diplomat
Journalist
Lawyer
Novelist
Poet Lawyer
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Panamá
Ends
Live
Writing
Start
Dies

More quotes by Carlos Fuentes

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In literature, you know only what you imagine
Carlos Fuentes
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No government functions without the grease of corruption.
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No, it's not that they're bad. It's that they're obliged to pretend they're good. They've been brought up to deceive and be cunning, to protect themselves from our society. I don't want to be like that.
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Love can isolate us from everything around us. But in its absence, we can be filled with the fear that something comparable exists.
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The citizen takes his city for granted far too often. He forgets to marvel.
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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.
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I’ve been thrashed by the critics. I love having critics for breakfast. I’ve been having them for 30 years in Mexico - just eating them like chicken and then throwing the bones away. They have not survived, I have!
Carlos Fuentes
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I am not interested in slice of life, what I want is a slice of the imagination.
Carlos Fuentes
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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.
Carlos Fuentes
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I live through risk. Without risk there is no art. You should always be on the edge of a cliff about to fall down and break your neck.
Carlos Fuentes
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Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.
Carlos Fuentes
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Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.
Carlos Fuentes
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Mexico is a very complex, mysterious country. I will never understand it fully, and that's why I write so much about it, in order to try to understand it.
Carlos Fuentes
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The women I have loved I have desired for themselves, but also because I feared myself.
Carlos Fuentes
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I need, therefore I imagine.
Carlos Fuentes
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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.
Carlos Fuentes
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The French equate intelligence with rational discourse, the Russians with intense soul-searching. For the Mexican, intelligence is inseparable from maliciousness.
Carlos Fuentes
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What's happened at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq is one of the grossest violations of human rights under the Geneva Conventions that we have record of. It is simply monstrous.
Carlos Fuentes
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I like fighting. I get into rows all the time.
Carlos Fuentes
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Reading, writing, teaching, learning, are all activities aimed at introducing civilizations to each other.
Carlos Fuentes