Novelists From Mexico

"The prison was very important—as everywhere on earth. Everywhere the building of a prison is the first step in the organization of a civilized state."

"It was as though over this solid dense world of plants floated a call urging creation to beget a new planet, a fantastic one in which not man or beast would be the master but plants. One felt lonely and abandoned, separated from all the remaining world, in spite of the long file of peons and the grunting and snorting pack animals marching along mechanically. The marchers, men and animals, seemed to move without volition, almost dreamlike, into the world of plants to be swallowed up by it."

"Ich warte nicht auf die Einigkeit; denn ich bin die Einigkeit. / Ich warte nicht auf die Masse; denn ich bin die Masse. / Ich warte nicht auf die Revolution; denn ich bin die Revolution. / Ehe die Revolution ist, muß der Revolutionär sein! / Ehe die Masse ist, muß der Einzelne sein! / Ehe die Einigkeit ist, muß der Eine sein, der Selbe! / Das Wort muß sein, bevor das Feldgeschrei und die Parole sein können."

"People who do not know what hard work really means and do nothing but just figure out new laws against criminal syndicalism and against communist propaganda usually say, when they see a man at hard work: "Oh, these guys are used to it, they don't feel it at all. They have no refined thinking-capacity, as we have. The chain-gang means nothing to them; it's just like a vacation." They use that speech as a dope to calm their consciences, which, underneath, hurt them when they see human beings treated worse than mules. But there is no such thing in the world as getting used to pain and suffering. With that "Oh, they are used to that!" people justify even the beating of defenseless police-prisoners. Better kill them; it is truly more merciful."

"If the company wants to beat competition, the drag and the fireman have to pay for it. Some way or other. Both the company and the crew cannot win. One has to be the loser in this battle, as in all other battles."

"No use to preach to the working-man courtesy and politeness when at the same time the working-man is not given working conditions under which he can always stay polite and soft-mannered. One must not expect clean speech from a man compelled to live in filth and always overtired and usually hungry."

"Imperator Caesar Augustus: don't you ever worry! You will always have gladiators. And you will have more than you will ever need. The strongest, the finest, the bravest men will be your gladiators; they will fight for you, and dying they will hail you: Morituri te salutamus! Hail, Cæsar Augustus! The moribund are greeting you. Happy? I am the happiest man on earth to have the honor to fight and to die for you, you god Imperator."

"The worker who has a job feels superior to a worker who is without one. Workers are not at all as chummy toward each other as some people think when they see them marching with red flags to Union Square and getting noisy about a paradise in Russia. Workers might have a big word in all affairs were it not for the middle-class ideas they can't shake off. The one who makes the delicate parts of an engine feels superior to the man who stands before a lathe making bolts by the ten thousand. And the man at the lathe feels superior to the poor Czech who gathers up the scraps from the floor and carries them in a wheelbarrow to the back-yard."

"There is no reason why I should run after a job. I'd have to stand up before the manager like a beggar, cap in hand, as sheepishly as if I were asking him to let me shine his shoes with my spit. In fact, usually it is less humiliating to beg for a meal than to ask for work. Can the skipper sail his bucket without sailors? Or can the engineer, no matter how clever he is, build a locomotive without workers? Nevertheless, the worker has to stand with his cap in hand and beg for a job. He has to stand there like a dog about to be beaten."

"The class I belong to always has to wait and wait, stand long nights and days in long files to get a cup of coffee and a slice of bread. Everybody in the world, official or boss, takes it for granted that our sort of people have ages, of time to waste. It is different with those who have money. They can arrange everything with money. Therefore they never have to wait. We who cannot pay with cold cash have to pay with our time instead. Suppose you get sore at the official who lets you wait and wait, and you say something about the citizen’s right it won’t help you a bit. He then lets you wait ten times longer, and you never do it again. He is the king. Do not forget that. Don’t ever believe that kings were done with when the fathers of the country made a revolution."

"The death ship is it I am in, All I have lost, nothing to win"

"Life is worth more than any book one can write."

"The biography of a creative man is completely unimportant."

"An author should have no other biography than his books."

"I am freer than anybody else. I am free to choose the parents I want, the country I want, the age I want."

"[In response to the question "Who the hell are you?"] If I knew, I think I would not be able to continue writing, or wouldn't have written the books I have written."

"My personal history would not be disappointing to readers, but it is my own affair which I want to keep to myself. I am in fact in no way more important than is the typesetter for my books, the man who works the mill; ... no more important than the man who binds my books and the woman who wraps them and the scrubwoman who cleans up the office."

"Nothing can last forever; there is no memory, however intense, that does not fade."

"A whole generation of the Chicano writers were influenced by the Latin American male boom because that's all we got. Borges was an influence, but the ones I really stay with are Manuel Puig and Juan Rulfo. Rulfo obviously for his rhythms and what he's doing with voices."

"Among the Mexican writers I prefer Juan Rulfo for the wonderful mystery and magic of his writings, all those disembodied voices."

"I belong to the first generation of Latin American writers brought up reading other Latin American writers. Before my time the work of Latin American writers was not well distributed, even on our continent. In Chile it was very hard to read other writers from Latin America. My greatest influences have been all the great writers of the Latin American Boom in literature: García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Borges, Paz, Rulfo, Amado, etc."

"I owe a special debt to Juan Rulfo, the Mexican writer who gave voice to the blood-soaked earth of the Mexican Revolution and a people who endure."

"The living are those who are a shame. Don't you think so? The dead do not give war to anyone; but what is alive, they do not find how to mortify the lives of others. If they even kill each other to end the hearts of others. With that I tell you everything. On the other hand, we must not hate the dead. They are the great thing. Are good. The best beings on earth."

"Learn this, son: in the new nest you have to leave an egg. When I aged you, you will learn to live, you will know that the children are leaving you, that they do not thank you for anything; They eat until your memory."

"’I will get to the idea that I dreamed you,’ he said. Because the truth is that I've known you for a long time, but I like you more when I dream of you. Then I make of you what I want. Not like now that, as you see, we have not been able to do anything."

"It is a difficult thing to grow up knowing that the thing where we can hold on to take root is dead."

"In my life there are many silences…In my writing, too."

"Tradition is an element that enters into play with destiny, because you are born into a particular family -- Jewish or Islamic or Christian or Mexican -- and your family determines to some extent what you are expected to become. And society is always there attempting to determine the role we will play within it. And these expectations are not always in good relationship with our personal desires. I am always interested in that relationship between outer reality and inner desire, and I think it is important to pay attention to the inner voice, because it is the only way to discover your mission in life, and the only way to develop the strength to break with whatever familial or cultural norms are preventing you from fulfilling your destiny."

"As a teacher I realize that what one learns in school doesn't serve for very much at all, that the only thing one can really learn is self understanding and this is something that can't be taught. The law of love is what one really should be learning in school, and what I want to communicate to people is that they should disobey the social rules that do not pertain to them, they should rebel against what is not personally true."

"The only way to find peace is when you are not separated, when you are not fighting, when you part of the whole."

"I grew up in a modern home, but my grandmother lived across the street in an old house that was built when churches were illegal in Mexico…She had a chapel in the home, right between the kitchen and dining room. The smell of nuts and chilies and garlic got all mixed up with the smells from the chapel, my grandmother's carnations, the liniments and healing herbs."

"As a very young girl, I understood that the interior activities of the home are as significant as the exterior activities of society."

"I admire him a lot. He has done a lot to bring the Latin American situation to the American consciousness."

"I was influenced by all of them-by García Márquez, by Carlos Fuentes, [[Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, so many of them-some of my own generation, like Eduardo Galeano. It's easy for me to write because I don't have to invent anything. They already found a voice, a way of telling us to ourselves, so it's easy."

"A tropical Mussolini"

"Can you imagine me coming to this country to blow up a post office? I told them, "My bombs are my books.""

"[The Mexican revolution] was a break with the past to recover the past. We were trying to deny we had an Indian and a black and a Spanish past. The Mexican Revolution accepted all heritages. It allowed Mexico to be mestizo."

"No government functions without the grease of corruption."

"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."

"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."

"Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre."

"The North American world blinds us with its energy; we cannot see ourselves, we must see you."

"What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others."

"The facade of the Conquest, severe yet jocund, with one foot in the dead Old World and the other in the New."

"Cortázar is the one who is closest to my way of understanding the act of writing. And nearer to my heart. I admire Carlos Fuentes on the opposite extreme of the equation. That is why I wrote a book on both of them, Entrecruzamientos: Cortázar/Fuentes."

"Lo que me interesa del fascismo es justamente que es un hoyo negro de la voluntad. Es un sistema que no necesariamente es único, pero absuelve la brutalidad, absuelve la falta de moral y absuelve la decisión propia. Cuando te dicen “Tú puedes matar a esta gente porque que son judíos, rojos o homosexuales, ¡lo que sea!” En ese mundo puedes permitir una acción brutal en base a un consejo colectivo, eso es lo que me asusta."

"Para mí estas cosas son como una cebolla, entre más capas descubres, más vas llorando. No hay vencedores en las guerras, sólo sangre y vencidos."

"The point of being over 40 is to fulfill the desires you've been harboring since you were 7."

"[He] is, in my opinion, the new Orson Welles."

"Guillermo Del Toro is the most challenging of directors in the fantasy field because he invents from scratch, or adapts into his own vision. He has made six features since his debut at 29 with Cronos, and I have admired, even loved, all of them."