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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
Brought
Protect
Society
Good
Deceive
Like
Deceiving
Cunning
Obliged
Pretend

More quotes by Carlos Fuentes

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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.
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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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I am a literary animal. For me, everything ends in literature.
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You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not to die.
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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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I have no literary fears.
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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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In Latin America, even atheists are Catholics.
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I am not interested in slice of life, what I want is a slice of the imagination.
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I like fighting. I get into rows all the time.
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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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One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.
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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.
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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.
Carlos Fuentes
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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.
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I had the good fortune of having a happy, closely knit family.
Carlos Fuentes
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Incredible the animal that first dreamed of another animal.
Carlos Fuentes
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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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The women I have loved I have desired for themselves, but also because I feared myself.
Carlos Fuentes