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.
Carlos FuentesRead
One wants to tell a story, like Scheherezade, in order not to die. It's one of the oldest urges in mankind. It's a way of stalling death.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The urge to tell stories is a fundamental human instinct linked to our desire for survival and meaning.
In this quote, Carlos Fuentes highlights the deep-seated human instinct to tell stories as a means of finding purpose and staving off the inevitability of death. By comparing storytelling to the character of Scheherezade, who tells tales to delay her fate, Fuentes suggests that sharing narratives is not just a form of entertainment but a vital part of the human experience that connects us to our mortality and the continuum of life.
Themes
StorytellingMortalityHuman NatureSurvivalNarrative
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of narrative in education, one might say, 'As Carlos Fuentes stated, storytelling is a fundamental human urge that helps us understand our place in the world.
More from Carlos Fuentes
All quotes →Writing is a struggle against silence.
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Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.
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No, it's not that they're bad. It's that they're obliged to pretend they're good. They've been brought up to deceive and be cunning, to protect themselves from our society. I don't want to be like that.
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You have an absolute freedom in Mexican writing today in which you don't necessarily have to deal with the Mexican identity. You know why? Because we have an identity... We know who we are. We know what it means to be a Mexican.
Carlos FuentesRead
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.
Carlos FuentesRead
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