Mario Vargas Llosa Quotes

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.

I don’t want to finish my life not being alive. I think that is the saddest thing that can happen to a person. I want to keep living to the end.

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

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

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

In general, a writer would like to think that the best book that he has written is the book that he is writing, and the next book will be even better. Maybe if this is not true, it is very useful to keep the illusion alive.

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

Today, everybody is more or less conscious of the total failure of the Cuban revolution to produce wealth, to produce a better standard of living for the Cubans. With the exception of small radical parties, Latin Americans know that it’s a brutal dictatorship and the longest in Latin American history.

Only if I reach 100 years old will I write a very complete autobiography. Not before.

I thought that, when I came to New York, that I would have a very life here for three months or three and a half months. And my impression is that it won’t be so quiet as I wanted.

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

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.

I think everybody, or the great majority of human beings, have this aspiration to become other: to live a different identity, at least for a while.

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.

I would like my novels to be read the way I read the novels I love.

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

There are so many new young poets, novelists, and playwrights who are much less politically committed than the former generations. The trend is to be totally concentrated on the literary aesthetic and to consider politics to be something dirty that shouldn’t be mixed with an artistic or a literary vocation.

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

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.

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

Reality is the richest thing there is, the most important thing there is. Our imagination allows us to live an artificial life that is wonderful, extremely rich, but I don’t believe any artist would dare to say that artifice is better than real life.

Good literature always ends up showing those who read it… the inevitable limitation of all power to fulfill human aspirations and desires.

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

I think that literature has the important effect of creating free, independent, critical citizens who cannot be manipulated.

I think that literature is something that embraces a much larger experience than politics. It’s an expression of what is life, of what are all the dimensions of life. But politics is one among others.

If you live in a country where there is nothing comparable to free information, often literature becomes the only way to be more or less informed about what’s going on.

In fiction, you are not limited by real facts. You can manipulate reality; you can invent without being disloyal to the essence of history.

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

I love stories, and my life is principally concentrated on stories, but not with a pretense of scientific precision.

Faulkner was the first novelist I read with pen and paper in hand because his technique stunned me.

Iraq is better without Saddam Hussein than with Saddam Hussein. Without a doubt.

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

Everyone is in a rush in New York, even in restaurants and in cafes. You dont have the serenity. That, I think, is very important in order to read.

A novel is something, while despair is nothing.

Couldn’t imagine any other way of living, outside of books, outside my work. Which doesn’t mean I am not interested in other things, of course – I am interested in many things. But the center, the crux, is always literature.