Mario Vargas Llosa Quotes

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

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

Nothing better protects a human being against the stupidity of prejudice, racism, religious or political sectarianism, and exclusivist nationalism than this truth that invariably appears in great literature: that men and women of all nations and places are essentially equal, and only injustice sows among them discrimination, fear, and exploitation.

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.

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

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

There are people with a lot of prejudice, a lot of fear of the unknown. They think that immigration is a danger, when really it is a solution. This is an interesting issue, because it will be a central question of our time.

‎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.

We must mistrust utopias: they usually end in holocausts.

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

Violence represents the worst kind of conformism.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.

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

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.

Once upon a time, there was a boy who learned to read at the age of 5. This changed his life. Owing to the adventure tales he read, he discovered a way to escape from the poor house, the poor country, and the poor reality in which he lived.

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

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.

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

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

Men do not live by truth alone; they also need lies: those that they invent freely, not those that are imposed on them; those that appear as they are, not smuggled in beneath the clothes of history. Fiction enriches their existence, completes them and, fleetingly, compensates them for this tragic condition which is our lot: always to desire and dream more than we can actually achieve.