Mario Vargas Llosa Quotes

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

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

Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life.

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

The secret to a masterpiece is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.

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.

Its easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it

Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.

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

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.

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.

When I was young, when I started to write, we were totally convinced that literature was a kind of weapon.

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

Revolution will free society of its afflictions, while science will free the individual of his.

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

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

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

Violence represents the worst kind of conformism.

A good novel is a conjunction of many factors, the main of which is without a doubt, hard work.

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.

We must mistrust utopias: they usually end in holocausts.

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.

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

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

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

We were trained as writers with the idea that literature is something that can change reality, that it's not just a very sophisticated entertainment, but a way to act.

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

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

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.

A novel which persuades us of its truth is true however full of lies it may be

Reading was such an enrichment of my life. And it was that pleasure that I had as a very young reader probably that is the origin of my vocation.

I have a chest full of all the insults, villainies, and infamies a man is capable of withstanding. . . . If you become famous, you will have to go through that.

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

There are many things behind a good novel, but in particular there is a lot of work - a lot of patience, a lot of stubbornness, and a critical spirit.

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.

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.

It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.

I write because I'm unhappy. I write because it's a way of fighting unhappiness.

In general, I think my freedom of invention is not limited when I use historical characters.

writing fiction is the best thing there is because absolutely everything is possible!

Journalism is a way of voicing opinion, of participating in the political, social, or cultural debate.

I have been always fascinated and seduced by history, which I think is very close, very close to literature.

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

I don't accept the idea that literature can be just entertainment and that there is no consequences of literature in the real world.

North American society could not have reached its state of high development and modernity had it not been an open society.

Liberty is inseparable from social justice, and those who dissociate them, sacrificing the first with the purpose of attaining the second more quickly, are the true barbarians of our time.

We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.

Living is worth the effort if only because without life we could not read or imagine stories.

It is as if Little Red Riding Hood had asked the wolf: "Dear Grandmother, what is the truth for?" And the wolf had replied: "The truth helps me tell you better lies.

Because of literature we can decipher, at least partially, the hieroglyphic that existence tends to be for the great majority of human beings.