writer, screenwriter, diplomat, novelist, lawyer, journalist, poet lawyer, prose writer, playwright, opinion journalist, lecturer, critic, polymath, poet
1928 – 2012
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.
The contract between the author and the reader is a game. And the game . . . is one of the greatest invetions of Western civilization: the game of telling stories, inventing characters, and creating the imaginary paradise of the individual, from whence no one can be expelled because, in a novel, no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be heard and understood.
I am not interested in slice of life, what I want is a slice of the imagination.
One wants to tell a story, like Scheherezade, in order not to die. It's one of the oldest urges in mankind. It's a way of stalling death.
I use a lot of film images, analogies, and imagination.
You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not to die.
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.
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.
The facade of the Conquest, severe yet jocund, with one foot in the dead Old World and the other in the New.
What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others.
The North American world blinds us with its energy; we cannot see ourselves, we must see you.
Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre.
If the Soviet Union can give up the Brezhnev Doctrine for the Sinatra Doctrine, the United States can give up the James Monroe Doctrine for the Marilyn Monroe Doctrine: Let's all go to bed wearing the perfume we like best.
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.
No government functions without the grease of corruption.
[The Mexican revolution] was a break with the past to recover the past. We were trying to deny we had an Indian and a black and a Spanish past. The Mexican Revolution accepted all heritages. It allowed Mexico to be mestizo.
Can you imagine me coming to this country to blow up a post office? I told them, "My bombs are my books."