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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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Carlos Fuentes
Age: 83 †
Born: 1928
Born: November 11
Died: 2012
Died: May 15
Diplomat
Journalist
Lawyer
Novelist
Poet Lawyer
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Panamá
Throwing
Bones
Critics
Eating
Thrashed
Away
Chicken
Years
Survived
Love
Mexico
Like
Breakfast

More quotes by 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.
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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 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'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.
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Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.
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chaos: it has no plural.
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I am a literary animal. For me, everything ends in literature.
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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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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 had the good fortune of having a happy, closely knit family.
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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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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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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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I have two children who died before reaching 30, so who am I to complain about being alive?
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Reading, writing, teaching, learning, are all activities aimed at introducing civilizations to each other.
Carlos Fuentes
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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
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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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The citizen takes his city for granted far too often. He forgets to marvel.
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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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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