Religion is dogmatic. Politic is ideological. Reason must be logical, but literature has a privilege of being equivocal.
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.
By its very nature, the novel indicates that we are becoming. There is no final solution. There is no last word.
There is no creation without tradition; the ‘new’ is an inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a variation on the past.
Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.
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.
There must be something beyond slaughter and barbarism to support the existence of mankind and we must all help search for it.
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.
Incredible the animal that first dreamed of another animal.
I use a lot of film images, analogies, and imagination.
The possibility of being as free with the camera as we are with the pen is a fantastic prospect for the creative life of the 21st century.
The Mexicans descend from the Aztecs; the Peruvians descend from the Incas; the Argentineans descend from the boats.
Death is the great Maecenas, Death is the great angel of writing. You must write because you are not going to live any more.
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.
I like fighting. I get into rows all the time.
Some writers achieve great popularity and then disappear forever. The bestseller lists of the past fifty years are, with a few lively exceptions, a sombre graveyard of dead books.
I started my own magazine with drawings, commentary, news, film reviews and drawings.
There are people whose external reality is generous because it is transparent, because you can read everything, accept everything, understand everything about them: people who carry their own sun with them.
I’ve lost audiences, I’ve recovered them.
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.