Mario Vargas Llosa famous quotes

Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Memories #Simple #Past

Reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Reading #Protest #Insufficiency

‎Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure...but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Dream #Integrity #Reading

You cannot teach creativity - how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Creativity #Helping #Kind

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Political #Creation #Incompatibility

In my case, literature is a kind of revenge. It's something that gives me what real life can't give me - all the adventures, all the suffering. All the experiences I can only live in the imagination, literature completes.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Revenge #Real #Adventure

Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Writing #Demon #Exorcist

I learned to read at the age of five, in Brother Justiniano’s class at the De la Salle Academy in Cochabamba, Bolivia. It is the most important thing that has ever happened to me. Almost seventy years later I remember clearly how the magic of translating the words in books into images enriched my life, breaking the barriers of time and space...
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Brother #Book #Years

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Despair #Matter #Ephemeral

Literature is a form of permanent insurrection. Its mission is to arouse, to disturb, to alarm, to keep men in a constant state of dissatisfaction with themselves.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Writing #Men #Literature

The worst thing that can happen to an artist is to be subsidized by the state. It leads to an intellectual and artistic castration.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Artist #Intellectual #States

This fact was something I also learned from this first novel that I needed personal experience to invent, to fantasize, to create fiction, but at the same time I needed some distance, some perspective on this experience in order to feel free enough to manipulate it and to transform it into fiction. If the experience is very close, I feel inhibited. I have never been able to write fiction about something that has happened to me recently. If the closeness of the real reality, of living reality, is to have a persuasive effect on my imagination, I need a distance, a distance in time and in space.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Real #Distance #Writing

One can't fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Fighting #Battle #Loser

If you are killed because you are a writer, that's the maximum expression of respect, you know.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Respect #Expression #Maximum

Since it is impossible to know what's really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream and take refuge in illusion. Because of these strange circumstances, Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Dream #Lying #Strange

Whether religious or racial, anti-Semitism is always repugnant, one of the most destructive manifestations of human stupidity and evil. What is profoundly expressed in it is man's traditional mistrust of the man who is not part of his tribe, that 'other' who speaks a different language, whose skin is a different color, and who participates in mysterious rites and rituals.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Religious #Men #Color

We must mistrust utopias: they usually end in holocausts.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Holocaust #Utopia #Ends

I think in a country like mine, violence is at the root of all human relations.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Country #Thinking #Roots

Death isn't enough. It doesn't remove the stain. But a slap, a whiplash, square on the face, does. Because a man's face is as sacred as his mother or his wife.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Mother #Men #Squares

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Moving #Animal #Rooms

I write because I'm unhappy. I write because it's a way of fighting unhappiness.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Writing #Fighting #Unhappy

Do the rhetorical quarrels of bourgeois political parties have anything to do with the interests of the humble and downtrodden?
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Party #Humble #Political

Prosperity or egalitarianism -- you have to choose. I favor freedom -- you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Real #Sacrifice #Equality

Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Lonely #Memories #Book

Eroticism has its own moral justification because it says that pleasure is enough for me; it is a statement of the individual's sovereignty.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Moral #Enough #Pleasure

I was very young and lived with my grandparents in a villa with white walls in the Calle Ocharan, in Miraflores.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Wall #White #Grandparent

It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Narrators #Impossible #Novel

That is one thing I am sure of amid my many uncertainties regarding the literary vocation: deep inside, a writer feels that writing is the best thing that ever happened to him, or could ever happen to him, because as far as he is concerned, writing is the best possible way of life, never mind the social, political, or financial rewards of what he might achieve through it.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Writing #Political #Mind

I always write a draft version of the novel in which I try to develop, not the story, not the plot, but the possibilities of the plot. I write without thinking much, trying to overcome all kinds of self-criticism, without stopping, without giving any consideration to the style or structure of the novel, only putting down on paper everything that can be used as raw material, very crude material for later development in the story.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Writing #Thinking #Self

Life is a shitstorm, in which art is our only umbrella." (spoken by character in a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa)
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Art #Character #Life Is

I convinced her that her first loyalty isn't to other people, but to her own feelings.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Loyalty #People #Feelings

Revolution will free society of its afflictions, while science will free the individual of his.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Revolution #Affliction #Individual

writing fiction is the best thing there is because absolutely everything is possible!
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Writing #Fiction

The writer’s job is to write with rigor, with commitment, to defend what they believe with all the talent they have. I think that’s part of the moral obligation of a writer, which cannot be only purely artistic. I think a writer has some kind of responsibility at least to participate in the civic debate. I think literature is impoverished, if it becomes cut from the main agenda of people, of society, of life.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Jobs #Believe #Writing

Science is still only a candle glimmering in a great pitch-dark cavern.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Dark #Caverns #Stills

Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Democracy #Election #Stakes

But what do I have? The things I'm told and the things I tell, that's all. And as far as I know, that never yet made anyone fly.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Made

No democracy is born perfect, and none ever gets to be perfect. Yet democracy is superior to authoritarian and totalitarian regimes because, unlike them, democracy is perfectible.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Perfect #Democracy #Born

The truths that seem most truthful, if you look at them from all sides, if you look at them close up, turn out to be either half truths or lies.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Truth #Lying #Half

Its easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Want #Easy #What You Want

The secret to happiness, at least to peace of mind, is knowing how to separate sex from love. And, if possible, eliminating romantic love from your life, which is the love that makes you suffer. That way, I assure you, you live with greater tranquility and enjoy things more.
-- Mario Vargas Llosa

#Sex #Romantic Love #Knowing