Mario Vargas-Llosa quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Mario Vargas-Llosa

Mario Vargas-Llosa Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Mario Vargas-Llosa on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

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

We must mistrust utopias: they usually end in holocausts.

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

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.

I know what a man feels close to the woman he loves, but he's affraid to do anything

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

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

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.

As everybody in the Andes knows, when the devil comes to work his evil on earth he sometimes takes the shape of a limping gringo stranger. And

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.

He was a man in the prime of his life, his fifties ... broad forehead, aquiline nose, penetrating gaze, the very soul of rectitude and goodness.

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

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

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

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

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

It's beautiful, as long as you concentrate on the landscape and the birds, because everything man-made there is ugly.

The real truth is one thing, and the literary truth is another; and there is nothing more difficult than to want both truths to coincide.

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

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

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

Because in the civilization of the spectacle, intellectuals are of interest only if they play the fashion game and become clowns.

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

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

There were so many problems; the hydra had so many heads, iniquity raised its head everywhere one looked.

it wouldn't surprise me if in a little while they begin to worship Leopold the Second the way they worship their fetishes and hideous objects." Where

When you start looking for purity in politics, you eventually get to unreality.

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

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

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

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

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

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

In matters concerning God, you have to believe, not reason," Herbert would say. "If you reason, God vanishes like a mouthful of smoke." Roger

Instead of speaking of justice and injustice, freedom and oppression, classless society and class society, they talked in terms of God and the Devil.

Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.

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

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

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

Reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life

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

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

The houses are ugly, imitations of imitations.

Violence represents the worst kind of conformism.

his eyes, he thought that in a few hours he, Lucrecia, and Fonchito would be crossing the skies, leaving behind the thick clouds

A writer is not always conscious of the influences he has received.

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.

Until then he had believed they justified colonialism: Christianity, civilization, and commerce.

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.

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

A Criminal is the case of surplus of human energy directed in the wrong direction.

Because happiness was temporal, individual, in exceptional circumstances twofold, on extremely rare occasions tripartite, and never collective, civic.

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

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

Probably there are no longer any societies in which the best people are attracted to civic duties.

Nostalgia is cowardice