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"Carmen Boullosa is as playful as a mischievous Puck, making a mockery of every stuffy convention with a powerful imagination that romps through page after page with felicity, fun, and creativity."

"A visit to the Mexican literary world recalls Dante’s procession through the inferno. I don’t want to point the finger at anyone in particular; it’s a collective evil. Octavio Paz was lucky to have lived in happier times. Though writers were already “yoked to the chariot of power”—the phrase was coined by Margo Glantz—as they have been since independence, their conscience and good names were still intact. I am especially disturbed by the corruption of the craft of the writer—contractors pass themselves off as intellectuals, thugs pretend to be poets—which has been so damaging to our critical conscience. This corruption reached grotesque levels during the term of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. We suffer at the hands of pseudohistorians and corrupt political analysts whose work legitimizes truly sinister public officials."

"Carmen Boullosa is, in my opinion, a true master."

"I am dead, my king," I wrote to you, meaning that defeat had overtaken me, even before the battle at Actium. "I am dead, my king. The word will not scorch your mouth because I have been dead to you for some time now. Follow the steps of Dionysus. Your god has abandoned Alexandria. Attended by an ostentatious procession, he left by the eastern gate late at night, awash with music, bearing our laughter with him."

"Everything was bound to change, I realized, when I started to imagine and couldn't stop imagining that the virulent outbreak of flu was spreading far and wide."

"if the novel has a power, it’s to touch that consciousness behind words, or before words. There is a kind of poet that always lives there, that lives in a preverbal world, and they work with their words to touch where the words cannot touch. They are always struggling…these two novels, they are nonverbal. They want to touch where words can’t touch. There are many things that cannot be touched by words. In this case, it was the world of the child. (2016)"

"They [novels] are a vice. It’s a vice so big that I cannot keep it hidden. I love to tell stories. I love to tell stories the way I tell them, not the way anybody else tells them. I am all the time writing a novel. I think it has to do with joy: there’s an immense pleasure in threading or organizing in a personal way those novels, and I also think it has to do with my Catholic training. Because in Catholicism, you learn to worship a superior god that creates, who organizes and creates. And when you do novels, you have this illusion that you are following the model of the creator, that you are playing the creator who has to organize that. It is a vice and a sin, and I like to sin. (2016)"

"If we don’t fight for spaces of tolerance and civility, Mexico could become a doomed country, marked by intolerance and fanaticism."

"The experience of love led me to poetry—I fell in love and I discovered what had been missing from my poems—; friendship and collaboration led me to theater; and motherhood led me to the novel."

"Women are not entirely excluded from public life and positions of power, but there is still a lot of work to be done to achieve equality between the two genders, in the literary world and elsewhere."

"I read the poems quickly, drinking them up, gulping them down, as if to get drunk. Poetry recharges my batteries. When I am rushing to finish a novel, I read poets like Lope de Vega, Jorge Guillén, Quevedo, Sor Juana, almost without reading them. They nourish my ear."

"I never feel that I have to be true to history: I have to be true to my story, so that it holds up. My novels use historical scenarios, but they are not at the service of history: they are neither memoirs nor testimonies. Like all novelists, I like reality, and I also like to betray reality by correcting its flaws and ultimately reinventing it."

"After reading documents and historical treatises, I began to write the novel, and this, for me, is a craft not unlike bricklaying. I’m not thinking of American construction workers, who arrive with ready-made walls and simply put them in place, but about Mexican bricklayers who painstakingly erect a building stone by stone, brick by brick. If you place a rock in the wrong place, it all comes tumbling down. And in a novel, if you put a sentence in the wrong place, the fictional building comes tumbling down."

"The religious freedom guaranteed by the Constitution has been always fully enjoyed; the many representatives of Catholic countries in the Diplomatic Corps and the Catholics prominent in Congress and in the departments are factors for social influence and a restraint upon illiberal legislation."

"He soon had to face serious dissensions over the claim by the laity to a voice in the appointment of clergy; he tactfully induced his flock to yield."