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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
Bones
Critics
Eating
Thrashed
Away
Chicken
Years
Survived
Love
Mexico
Like
Breakfast
Throwing

More quotes by Carlos Fuentes

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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 have no literary fears.
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I had the good fortune of having a happy, closely knit family.
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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 am a literary animal. For me, everything ends in literature.
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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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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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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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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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The women I have loved I have desired for themselves, but also because I feared myself.
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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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Memory is satisfied desire.
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I need, therefore I imagine.
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chaos: it has no plural.
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What America does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is to understand others.
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Reading, writing, teaching, learning, are all activities aimed at introducing civilizations to each other.
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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 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.
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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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