Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.

What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others.

Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

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.

Cuba needs a dose of perestroika.

Diplomacy in a sense is the opposite of writing. You have to disperse yourself so much: the lady who comes in crying because she's had a fight with the secretary; exports and imports; students in trouble; thumbtacks for the embassy.

I am a literary animal. For me, everything ends in literature.

I am a morning writer; I am writing at eight-thirty in longhand and I keep at it until twelve-thirty, when I go for a swim. Then I come back, have lunch, and read in the afternoon until I take my walk for the next day's writing.

I am not interested in slice of life, what I want is a slice of the imagination.

I believe in books that do not go to a ready-made public. I'm looking for readers I would like to make. To win them, to create readers rather than to give something that readers are expecting. That would bore me to death.

I had the good fortune of having a happy, closely knit family.

I love having critics for breakfast.

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.

My system for staying young is to work a lot, to always have a project on the go.

The United States condoned dictatorships in Latin America for much of the 20th century.

The United States has written the white history of the United States. It now needs to write the black, Latino, Indian, Asian and Caribbean history of the United States.

The historical problem of the United States is to admit that it is a multiracial and multi-ethnic nation.

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

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.

There are now 30-year-old Mexican writers who do great novels in which Mexico isn't even mentioned.

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

Under the veneer of Westernization, the cultures of the Indian world - which have existed for 30,000 years! - continue to live. Sometimes in a magical way, sometimes in the shadows.

What I want is to respond to the challenge posed by the mass media - to permit the novel to say what can only be said by narrative - to allow it to be itself.

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.

Writing requires the concentration of the writer, demands that nothing else be done except that.

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.

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.

Love can isolate us from everything around us. But in its absence, we can be filled with the fear that something comparable exists.

Myth is a past with a future, exercising itself in the present.

Writing is a struggle against silence.

We're gonna try and bring on all the different aspects of horror movie making and bring on guests and show all these old '50's B movies. Not the real corny ones, the real cool ones.

The thing is there have been American movies that are similar to Solaris, like Alien had a lot of things that are similar, although it's also got the horror element.

A win by an unsound combination, however showy, fills me with artistic horror.

You're going through the horror of it, you're going through the isolation of it but you're being empowered by reminding yourself that you're connected to everybody else.

As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.

There is an element of anger among women who've been raped. There's certainly a major element of humiliation. But it really does seem like a medical condition of shock and horror.

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.

Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.

This horror of pain is a rather low instinct and... if I think of human beings I've known and of my own life, such as it is, I can't recall any case of pain which didn't, on the whole, enrich life.

Horror does not interest me, and so I know little of its practicioners, old or current.

For the last 30 years our cinemas have been ruled by science fiction and horror. We've had some very good Fantasy films in that time period, but for my tastes I still haven't seen fantasy done to absolute perfection. That is the hope I have in this project.

All of us have our individual curses, something that we are uncomfortable with and something that we have to deal with, like me making horror films, perhaps.

This is an area you always need to address when you're dealing with Dracula is the fact that there is something kind of attractive in his darkness - which there isn't in other horror characters.

I have done some short pieces that are not horror.

I think what sets this one apart is that there are two horror movie icons finally battling each other. You actually see them beat the crap out of each other instead of just terrorizing the kids in the movie.

I saw 'Food, Inc.' last night - it was like a horror movie. I'm definitely thinking about my food supply now and how I want to grow my own.

I'd never watch a horror film, but after I found out I was going to be in one, I watched, like, four of them, including The Shining, I was terrified - I couldn't sleep for days. But I wanted to get myself used to things I was going to see on the set.