I live through risk. Without risk there is no art. You should always be on the edge of a cliff about to fall down and break your neck.

Most writers in Mexico have had posts as ambassadors, secretaries - that is no longer the case. Now a writer can live off writing. He has an audience: there are publishing houses, there are newspapers - so the situation is not as terrible as it used to be when there were no means and he had to go into government service, be an ambassador or a cabinet minister, etc. So, things are changing in the sense that the civil society is now the protagonist. The writer therefore occupies a different position, but no less influential than in the past, in a new, democratic society.

I am a Mexican. The United States lived seventy-five years with the one party system in Mexico - the PRI - without batting an eyelid, never demanding democracy of Mexico. Democracy came because Mexicans fought for democracy and made a democracy out of our history, our possibilities, our perspectives. Democracy is not something that can be exported like Coca-Cola. It has to be bred from the inside, according to the culture, the conditions of each country.

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.

You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not to die.

The new world economic order is not an exercise in philanthropy, but in enlightened self-interest for everyone concerned.

Contrary to the macho culture of Mexico, both my grandmothers were very brave young widows. I was always very close to these hard-working, intelligent women.