The citizen takes his city for granted far too often. He forgets to marvel.

There must be something beyond slaughter and barbarism to support the existence of mankind and we must all help search for it.

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.

Some writers achieve great popularity and then disappear forever. The bestseller lists of the past fifty years are, with a few lively exceptions, a sombre graveyard of dead books.

The United States still thinks that Mexico is a nineteenth century industrial society. It isn't that any longer, it has to adapt to a new reality. But we have a grave responsibility in Mexico, which is to give work to our own people. As long as we have a system that denies work to 50 percent of the population, you'll have immigrants coming to the United States.

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.

I’ve been thrashed by the critics. I love having critics for breakfast. I’ve been having them for 30 years in Mexico - just eating them like chicken and then throwing the bones away. They have not survived, I have!