Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate.

What America does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is to understand others.

What's happened at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq is one of the grossest violations of human rights under the Geneva Conventions that we have record of. It is simply monstrous.

Mexico is a very complex, mysterious country. I will never understand it fully, and that's why I write so much about it, in order to try to understand it.

Anything would be better in the US than what you have. As a government it's really very low quality, given the fact that this country produces eminent intellectuals, has great universities, and then the people who arrive in government are very mediocre. The Latin American situation has been very different in the first place, because writers have spoken for those who have no voice. The rate of illiteracy, poverty, joblessness in Latin America has been so great throughout our history that if the writers didn't speak out for the people, nobody would.

In a world torn by every kind of fundamentalism - religious, ethnic, nationalist and tribal - we must grant first place to economic fundamentalism, with its religious conviction that the market, left to its own devices, is capable of resolving all our problems. This faith has its own ayatollahs. Its church is neo-liberalism; its creed is profit; its prayers are for monopolies.

The possibility of being as free with the camera as we are with the pen is a fantastic prospect for the creative life of the 21st century.