Mario Vargas Llosa Quotes

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Mario Vargas Llosa

Profession : Writer

Birth : March 28, 1936

Good literature is absolutely necessary for a society that wants to be free.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Latin America seemed to be a land where there were only dictators, revolutionaries, catastrophes. Now we know that Latin America can produce also artists, musicians, painters, thinkers, and novelists.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Literature is dangerous: it awakens a rebellious attitude in us.

Mario Vargas Llosa

To write is a relief from life's problems. It is a way in which you revenge yourself. In art, the writer achieves utopia. But any attempt to achieve social utopia is bound to catastrophe. If you want a society of saints, the result is hell, repression, totalitarianism, and persecution.

Mario Vargas Llosa

What is essential in love is what the French call 'amour fou.' What is that in English? Crazy love? That doesn't sound as beautiful. It's a total kind of love that not only embraces feelings, actions, but a kind of understanding of the world from the perspective of love.

Mario Vargas Llosa

The Nobel prize is a fairytale for a week and a nightmare for a year. You can't imagine the pressure to give interviews, to go to book fairs.

Mario Vargas Llosa

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

Mario Vargas Llosa

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

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

In 1975, I went to the Dominican Republic for eight months during the shooting of a film based on my novel 'Captain Pantoja and the Special Service.' It was during this period I heard and read about Trujillo.

Mario Vargas Llosa

I think if you're impregnated with good literature, with good culture, you're much more difficult to manipulate, and you're much more aware of the dangers that powers represent.

Mario Vargas Llosa

I think yellow journalism is something that appears everywhere, in the underdeveloped and developed worlds alike.

Mario Vargas Llosa

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

Mario Vargas Llosa

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

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

Mario Vargas Llosa

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

Mario Vargas Llosa

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

Mario Vargas Llosa

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

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

When I was young, I was a passionate reader of Sartre. I've read the American novelists, in particular the lost generation - Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos - especially Faulkner. Of the authors I read when I was young, he is one of the few who still means a lot to me.

Mario Vargas Llosa