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

Fuentes contrasts a documentary, realist “slice of life” approach with a literature of invention. The remark signals his belief that fiction should not merely mirror everyday surfaces but transform reality through imagination—myth, history, fantasy, and formal experimentation—so that deeper cultural and psychological truths can emerge. In Fuentes’s work, especially his re-visions of Mexican and Latin American history, imagination becomes a way to interrogate power, identity, and memory rather than simply record them. The quote thus aligns him with modernist and postmodernist aesthetics: art as creation and critique, not reportage.