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.
Don’t classify me, read me. I’m a writer, not a genre.
The novel is the privileged vehicle of two ways of being: narrative and freedom: to be new (novel) in a speech open to all, and to be free in a speech that never concludes.
Power does not alter a man’s character. It merely reveals it.
all that was left to me was certain images and all of them spoke to me of the collapse of a cruel world and the slow construction in its stead of another world, equally cruel.
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.
Nor is the limitation of what is sayable a limit to the doable: this last is the possibility of literature.
Language is always the companion of Empire and Empire . . . is one Monarch and one Sword.
The logic of the symbol does not express the experiment; it is the experiment. Language is the phenomenon, and the observation of the phenomenon changes its nature.
Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate.
Alessandra approached the geniuses of the past to give them life with her attention, which was the form her affection took: paying attention.
Normality; show me normality, señor caballero, and I will show you an exception to the abnormal order of the universe; show me a normal event and I shall call it miraculous because it is normal.
Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me.
Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.
…my books are derived from city images, and the city of my dreams or nightmares is Mexico City. (The Art of Fiction, No. 68. The Paris Review, No. 82, Winter 1981.)
Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.
I am not interested in slice of life, what I want is a slice of the imagination.
I use a lot of film images, analogies, and imagination.