The French equate intelligence with rational discourse, the Russians with intense soul-searching. For the Mexican, intelligence is inseparable from maliciousness.
Here among my books, my wife, my friends and my loves, I have plenty of reasons to keep living.
The new world economic order is not an exercise in philanthropy, but in enlightened self-interest for everyone concerned.
I love having critics for breakfast.
In literature, you know only what you imagine.
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.
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.
Robinson Crusoe, the first capitalist hero, is a self-made man who accepts objective reality and then fashions it to his needs through the work ethic, common sense, resilience, technology, and, if need be, racism and imperialism.
Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate.
Memory is satisfied desire.
In the name of certainty, the greatest crimes have been committed against humanity.
I am not interested in slice of life, what I want is a slice of the imagination.
I have no literary fears.
I had the good fortune of having a happy, closely knit family.
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.