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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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Carlos Fuentes
Age: 83 †
Born: 1928
Born: November 11
Died: 2012
Died: May 15
Diplomat
Journalist
Lawyer
Novelist
Poet Lawyer
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Panamá
Order
Country
Writing
Mexico
Trying
Complex
Much
Mysterious
Never
Fully
Understand
Write

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There is no creation without tradition. No one creates from nothing.
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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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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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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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Retrospectively, I would agree with Luis Bunuel that sex without sin is like an egg without salt.
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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 French equate intelligence with rational discourse, the Russians with intense soul-searching. For the Mexican, intelligence is inseparable from maliciousness.
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Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.
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The citizen takes his city for granted far too often. He forgets to marvel.
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Here among my books, my wife, my friends and my loves, I have plenty of reasons to keep living.
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I am a literary animal. For me, everything ends in literature.
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Incredible the animal that first dreamed of another animal.
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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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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.
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Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate.
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I must write the book out in my head now, before I sit down.
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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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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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