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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.

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
Like
Deceiving
Cunning
Obliged
Pretend
Brought
Protect
Society
Good
Deceive

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Memory is satisfied desire.
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The women I have loved I have desired for themselves, but also because I feared myself.
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You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not to die.
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The citizen takes his city for granted far too often. He forgets to marvel.
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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.
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Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate.
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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.
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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
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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!
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Reading, writing, teaching, learning, are all activities aimed at introducing civilizations to each other.
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In literature, you know only what you imagine
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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.
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What America does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is to understand others.
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I must write the book out in my head now, before I sit down.
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I had the good fortune of having a happy, closely knit family.
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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.
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Retrospectively, I would agree with Luis Bunuel that sex without sin is like an egg without salt.
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chaos: it has no plural.
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There must be something beyond slaughter and barbarism to support the existence of mankind and we must all help search for it.
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Like all of Latin America, Mexico after independence in 1821 turned its back on a triple heritage: on the Spanish heritage, because we were newly liberated colonies, and on our Indian and black heritages, because we considered them backward and barbaric. We looked towards France, England and the U.S., to become progressive democratic republics.
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