Mario Vargas Llosa Quotes about Writing

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.

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

Teaching, Writing, Creativity

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, Alarms

Mario Vargas Llosa (2011). “Making Waves: Essays”, p.52, Macmillan

Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Writing, Demon, Exorcist

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

Mario Vargas Llosa

Writing, Fighting, Unhappy

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

Mario Vargas Llosa (1991). “A Writer's Reality”, Mariner Books

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

Mario Vargas Llosa

Writing, Weapons, Literature

"Peruvian Writer Mario Vargas Llosa on the Importance of Literature". "PBS NewsHour" with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. May 31, 2012.

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

Mario Vargas Llosa

Writing, Fiction, Writing Fiction

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

Mario Vargas Llosa (2013). “A Writer's Reality”, p.48, Faber & Faber

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

Mario Vargas Llosa (2011). “Letters to a Young Novelist”, p.3, Macmillan

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

Mario Vargas Llosa Quotes about Writing

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