Carlos Fuentes

The United States is very good at understanding itself, and very bad at understanding others.

Diplomacy in a sense is the opposite of writing. You have to disperse yourself so much: the lady who comes in crying because she's had a fight with the secretary; exports and imports; students in trouble; thumbtacks for the embassy.

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.

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.

I am a morning writer; I am writing at eight-thirty in longhand and I keep at it until twelve-thirty, when I go for a swim. Then I come back, have lunch, and read in the afternoon until I take my walk for the next day's writing.

The new world economic order is not an exercise in philanthropy, but in enlightened self-interest for everyone concerned.

You have an absolute freedom in Mexican writing today in which you don't 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.

I have two children who died before reaching 30, so who am I to complain about being alive?

I love having critics for breakfast.

Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.

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.

Here among my books, my wife, my friends and my loves, I have plenty of reasons to keep living.