The French equate intelligence with rational discourse, the Russians with intense soul-searching. For the Mexican, intelligence is inseparable from maliciousness.
I have no literary fears.
I am a literary animal. For me, everything ends in literature.
Reading, writing, teaching, learning, are all activities aimed at introducing civilizations to each other.
One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.
There is no creation without tradition. No one creates from nothing.
The women I have loved I have desired for themselves, but also because I feared myself.
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.
Cuba needs a dose of perestroika.
The great wheel of fire of ancient wisdom, silence and word engendering the myth of the origin, human action engendering the epic voyage toward the other; historical violence revealing the tragic flaw of the hero who must then return to the land of origin; myth of death and renewal and silence from which new words and images will arise, keeps on turning in spite of the blindness of purely lineal thought.
Hay que morir antes de renacer.
Since I neither want not can influence the events of the world, my mission is to preserve the internal integrity and equilibrium of my mind; that will be in which the manor in which I recover the purity of the original act; I shall be my own citadel, and to it I shall retire to protect myself against a hostile and corrupt world. I shall be my own citadel and, within it, my own and only citizen.
But history does repeat itself; that is the comedy and the crime of history. Men learn nothing. Times change. Scenes change. Names change. But passions are the same.
To live is to betray your God. Every act in life, every act that affirms us as living beings, requires that the commandments of your God be broken.
Myth is a past with a future, exercising itself in the present.
Como que hay que guardar siempre las distancias, porque si no parece que se anda uno entregando demasiado.
All truth is double, and perhaps multiple; absolute reason is as dangerous as absolute faith; reason also has its madness.
Vivir es traicionar a tu Dios; cada acto de la vida, cada acto que nos afirma como seres vivos, exige que se violen los mandamientos de tu Dios.
He thought that even naturalness can be feigned; at times, a mask disguises too well the expressions of a face that does not exist either outside or under it.
How to accept the diversity and mutilation of the world, while retaining the minds power for analogy and unity, so this changing world shall not become meaningless?
Language is a shared and sharing part of a culture that cares little about formal classifications and much about vitality and connection, for culture itself perishes in purity or isolation, which is the deadly wages of perfection. Like bread and love, language is shared with others. And human beings share a tradition. There is no creation without tradition. No one creates from nothing.