Literary Birthday – 11 November – Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes was born 11 November 1928, and died 15 May 2012.

Carlos Fuentes: 10 Quotes On Writing

1. 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.
2. You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not to die.
3. 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.
4. Writing is a struggle against silence.
5. The contract between the author and the reader is a game. And the game is one of the greatest inventions 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.
6. I am a literary animal. For me, everything ends in literature.
7. One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.
8. Don’t classify me, read me. I’m a writer, not a genre.
9. Did you know we know we are all the object of another’s imagination?
10. Finished, the book begins.

Carlos Fuentes was a Mexican novelist and essayist. His novels include The Death of Artemio Cruz, Aura, and The Old Gringo. The New York Times described him as ‘one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world’ and an important influence on the explosion of Latin American literature in the 1960s and ’70s. He was often thought a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature although he never won.

Source for Image

by Amanda Patterson