Mexican writer, born November 11, 1928 in Panama City, Panama and died May 15, 2012 in Mexico City, Mexico.
Biography/bibliography in: "Contemporary Authors". New Revision Series, vol. 138, pages 162-171. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2005.
Member of the jury at the Venice Film Festival in 1967.
The contract between the author and the reader is a game. And the game is one of the greatest invetions 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.
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.
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.
The great wheel of fire of ancient wisdom, silence and word engendering the myth of the origin, human action engendering the epic voyage toward the other; historical violence revealing the tragic flaw of the hero who must then return to the land of origin; myth of death and renewal and silence from which new words and images will arise, keeps on turning in spite of the blindness of purely lineal thought.
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.
She begins to feel that the reality show is the university she never attended. Vicarious reality. Emotion without a value-added tax. Movement without danger. Alma finds her reality. She no longer has a reason to put herself at risk and go out into the hostile, degrading world.
Writing is a struggle against silence.
Since I neither want not can influence the events of the world, my mission is to preserve the internal integrity and equilibrium of my mind; that will be in which the manor in which I recover the purity of the original act; I shall be my own citadel, and to it I shall retire to protect myself against a hostile and corrupt world. I shall be my own citadel and, within it, my own and only citizen.
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. ),Like all of Latin America, Mexico after independence in 1821 turned its back on a triple heritage: on the Spanish heritage, because we were newly liberated colonies, and on our Indian and black heritages, because we considered them backward and barbaric. We looked towards France, England and the U. S.
to become progressive democratic republics.
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. .
