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

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

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

"If the Soviet Union can give up the Brezhnev Doctrine for the Sinatra Doctrine, the United States can give up the Jam…"

"I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before…"

"No government functions without the grease of corruption."

"[The Mexican revolution] was a break with the past to recover the past. We were trying to deny we had an Indian and a…"

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

"A tropical Mussolini"

"I was influenced by all of them-by García Márquez, by Carlos Fuentes, [[Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, José Donos…"