Mario Vargas-Llosa Quotes & Sayings

Nostalgia is cowardice — 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. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

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

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

Death isn't enough. It doesn't remove the stain. But a slap, a whiplash, square on the face, does. Because a man's face is as sacred as his mother or his wife. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

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 — Mario Vargas-Llosa

The search for liberty is simply part of the greater search for a world where respect for the rule of law and human rights is universal - a world free of dictators, terrorists, warmongers and fanatics, where men and women of all nationalities, races, traditions and creeds can coexist in the culture of freedom, where borders give way to bridges that people cross to reach their goals limited only by free will and respect for one another's rights. It is a search to which I've dedicated my writing, and so many have taken notice. But is it not a search to which we should all devote our very lives? The answer is clear when we see what is at stake — Mario Vargas-Llosa

I completely believe that - literature for me is a way of life. That's probably true of all writers or all artists. I think in the end this kind of activity absorbs one in such a way that it becomes one's way of life. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

I 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. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

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

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

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

Until then he had believed they justified colonialism: Christianity, civilization, and commerce. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

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. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

I know what a man feels close to the woman he loves, but he's affraid to do anything — Mario Vargas-Llosa

I think in a country like mine, violence is at the root of all human relations. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

I am somewhat allergic to explanations that divide men and women into frozen categories and attribute to each sex its characteristic virtues and shortcomings. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

Don't be afraid Mr. Onaka, we need you because none of us drives.
Can you imagine anything as dumb as that? They were going to make a revolution and they didn't even know how to drive a car. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

A good novel is a conjunction of many factors, the main of which is without a doubt, hard work. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

Honor, vengeance, that rigorous religion, those punctilicious codes of conduct - how to explain their existence here, at the end of the world, among people who possessed nothing but the rags and the lice they had on them? — Mario Vargas-Llosa

From a cultural point of view the richest moments in civilization, in history, have occurred when the boundaries separating popular and creative literature disappear, and literature becomes simultaneously both things-something that enriches all audiences, something that can satisfy all kinds of mentalities and knowledge and education, and at the same time is creative and artistic and popular. Dickens, Hugo, and Dumas are extraordinary cases in point; and in Spain in the nineteenth century there are many other examples, such as Perez Galdos. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

Its easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it — Mario Vargas-Llosa

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

democratic and liberal society, despite having created the highest living standards in history and reduced social violence, exploitation and discrimination more than at any other time, does not receive the enthusiastic support of its beneficiaries, but is greeted with boredom and scorn, if not systematic hostility. For — Mario Vargas-Llosa

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. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

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. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

I convinced her that her first loyalty isn't to other people, but to her own feelings. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

The disappearance of any minimal consensus about aesthetic value means that in this field confusion reigns and will continue to reign for a long time, since it is now not possible to discern with any degree of objectivity what it is to have talent or to lack talent, what is beautiful and what is ugly, what work represents something new and durable and what is just a will-o'-the-wisp. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

Borges's ethnocentric limitation does not detract from his many other admirable qualities, but it is best not to sidestep it when giving a comprehensive appraisal of his work. Certainly, it is a limitation that offers further proof of his humanity because, as has been said over and over again, there is no such thing as absolute perfection in this world, not even in the world of a creative artist like Borges, who comes as close as anyone to achieving it. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

The foundations of liberty are private property and the rule of law; this system guarantees the fewest possible forms of injustice, produces the greatest material and cultural progress, most effectively stems violence and provides the greatest respect for human rights. According to this concept of liberalism, freedom is a single, unified concept. Political and economic liberties are as inseparable as the two sides of a medal. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

In general, I think my freedom of invention is not limited when I use historical characters. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

Whether religious or racial, anti-Semitism is always repugnant, one of the most destructive manifestations of human stupidity and evil. What is profoundly expressed in it is man's traditional mistrust of the man who is not part of his tribe, that 'other' who speaks a different language, whose skin is a different color, and who participates in mysterious rites and rituals. — 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 — Mario Vargas-Llosa

The sort of decision arrived at by saints and madmen is not revealed to others. It is forged little by little, in the folds of the spirit, tangential to reason, shielded from indiscreet eyes, not seeking the approval of others - who would never grant it - until it is at last put into practice. I imagine that in the process - the conceiving of a project and its ripening into action - the saint, the visionary, or the madman isolates himself more and more, walling himself up in solitude, safe from the intrusion of others. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

One can't fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

A writer is not always conscious of the influences he has received. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

Their curses were not aimed at any definite target: they swore at such abstractions as God, the Officers, the Mothers of Others, with more music than meaning. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

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

If you are killed because you are a writer, that's the maximum expression of respect, you know. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

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. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

It was a question I asked myself each time one of these studies or field observations came to my attention, and I saw, once again, that no mention was made, even in passing, of those wandering tellers of tales, who seemed to me to be the most exquisite and precious exemplars of that people, numbering a mere handful, and who, in any event, had forged that curious emotional link between the Machiguengas and my own vocation (not to say, quite simply, my own life). — Mario Vargas-Llosa

Writers are the exorcists of their own demons. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

A novel which persuades us of its truth is true however full of lies it may be — Mario Vargas-Llosa

I write because I'm unhappy. I write because it's a way of fighting unhappiness. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

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. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

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. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

I learned to read at the age of five, in Brother Justiniano's class at the De la Salle Academy in Cochabamba, Bolivia. It is the most important thing that has ever happened to me. Almost seventy years later I remember clearly how the magic of translating the words in books into images enriched my life, breaking the barriers of time and space and allowing me to travel with Captain Nemo twenty thousand leagues under the sea, fight with d'Artagnan, Athos, Portos, and Aramis against the intrigues threatening the Queen in the days of the secretive Richelieu, or stumble through the sewers of Paris, transformed into Jean Valjean carrying Marius's inert body on my back. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

Revolution will free society of its afflictions, while science will free the individual of his. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

There were so many problems; the hydra had so many heads, iniquity raised its head everywhere one looked. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

[Immigrants] who come from anywhere there is hunger, unemployment, oppression, and violence and who clandestinely cross the borders of countries that are prosperous, peaceful, and rich in opportunity, are certainly breaking the law, but they are exercising a natural and moral right which no legal norm or regulation should try to eliminate: the right to life, to survival, to escape the infernal existence they are condemned to by barbarous regimes entrenched on half the earth's surface. If ethical considerations had any pervasive effect at all, the women and men who brave the Straits of Gibraltar or the Florida Keys or the electric fences of Tijuana or the docks of Marseilles in search of work, freedom, and a future should be received with open arms. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

A person who does not read, or reads little, or reads only trash, is a person with an impediment: he can speak much but he will say little, because his vocabulary is deficient in the means for self-expression.
This is not only a verbal limitation. It represents also a limitation in intellect and imagination. It is a poverty of thought, for the simple reason that ideas, the concepts through which we grasp the secrets of our condition, do not exist apart from words. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

We were trained as writers with the idea that literature is something that can change reality, that it's not just a very sophisticated entertainment, but a way to act. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

Borges's world is as grounded in the changing nature of existence, that common predicament of the human species, as any literary world that has lasted. How could it be otherwise? No work of fiction that turns its back on life or that is incapable of illuminating life has ever attained durability. What is singular about Borges is that in his world the existential, the historical, sex, psychology, feelings, instincts, and so forth, have been dissolved and reduced to an exclusively intellectual dimension; and life, that boiling, chaotic turmoil, reaches the reader sublimated and conceptualized, transformed into literary myth through the filter of Borges, a filter of such perfect logic that it sometimes appears not to distill life to its essence but to suppress it altogether. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

When you start looking for purity in politics, you eventually get to unreality. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

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

they knew what we're doing for them, they'd kiss our feet. But mentally they are closer to the crocodile and the hippopotamus than to you or me. That's why we decide what is good for them and have them sign those contracts. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

Reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life — Mario Vargas-Llosa

Liberty is inseparable from social justice, and those who dissociate them, sacrificing the first with the purpose of attaining the second more quickly, are the true barbarians of our time. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

But it (serial television) doesn't remain in the mind. It doesn't produce positive effects in political terms, in ideological terms. My impression is that this extraordinary digital revolution is producing also an extraordinary confusion. — 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

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

He undressed and, wearing slippers and a robe, went to the bathroom to shave. He turned on the radio. They read the newspapers on the Dominican Voice and Caribbean Radio. Until a few years ago the news bulletins had begun at five. But when his brother Petan, the owner of the Dominican Voice, found out that he woke at four, he moved the newscasts up an hour. The other stations followed suit. They knew he listened to the radio while he shaved, bathed, and dressed, and they were painstakingly careful. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

In the civilization of our times, it is normal, and almost obligatory, for cookery and fashion to take up most of the culture sections, for chefs and fashion designers now enjoy the prominence that before was given to scientists, composers and philosophers. Gas burners, stoves and catwalks meld, in the cultural coordinates of our time, with books, laboratories and operas, while TV stars and great footballers exert the sort of influence over habits, taste and fashion that was previously the domain of teachers and thinkers — Mario Vargas-Llosa

And yet, my dear Estela, in the end one accepts the will of God, resigns oneself, and discovers that, even with all its calvaries, life is full of beautiful things. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

This "manna from heaven" was being squandered because of the laziness and stupidity of the savages who refused to work as harvesters of latex and obliged the planters to go to the tribes and take them by force. Which meant a great loss of time and money for the enterprises. "Well, — Mario Vargas-Llosa

Journalism is a way of voicing opinion, of participating in the political, social, or cultural debate. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

Well, at heart I knew she'd never be a normal woman. And I didn't want her to be one, because what I loved in her were the indomitable and unpredictable aspects of her personality — Mario Vargas-Llosa

Journalism has been very important for me - for a long time I made my living as a journalist, and it also serves as a source of ideas. Many of the things I have written I would not have written without the experience of being a journalist. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

Probably there are no longer any societies in which the best people are attracted to civic duties. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

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

One of the most damaging myths of our time is that poor countries live in poverty because of a conspiracy of the rich countries, who arrange things so as to keep them underdeveloped, in order to exploit them. — 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

It's easier to imagine the death of one person than those of a hundred or a thousand. When multiplied, suffering becomes abstract. It's not easy to be moved by abstract things. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

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 — Mario Vargas-Llosa

The houses are ugly, imitations of imitations. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

Light literature, along with light cinema and light art, give the reader and the viewer the comfortable impression that they are cultured, revolutionary, modern and in the vanguard without having to make the slightest intellectual effort. Culture that purports to be avant-garde and iconoclastic instead offers conformity in its worst forms: smugness and self-satisfaction. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

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

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

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. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

My impression is that life - a big word, I know - inflicts themes on a writer through certain experiences that impress themselves on his consciousness or subconscious and later compel him to shake himself free by turning them into stories. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

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. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

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. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

Living is worth the effort if only because without life we could not read or imagine stories. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

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. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

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. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

Violence represents the worst kind of conformism. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

Roger reached the conclusion that the hero of his childhood and youth was one of the most unscrupulous villains the West had excreted onto the continent of Africa. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

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

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

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. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

Even though what I enjoy most is literature, I would not want to live only in a world of fiction, cut off from the rest of life. No - I want to always have a foot in the street, to be inmersed in the activities of my contemporaries, in the times, in the place where I live. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

It is the case that, albeit to a lesser extent, all fictions make their readers live "the impossible", taking them out of themselves, breaking down barriers, and making them share, by identifying with the characters of the illusion, a life that is richer, more intense, or more abject and violent, or simply different from the one that they are confined to by the high-security prison that is real life. Fictions exist because of this fact. Because we have only one life, and our desires and fantasies demand a thousand lives. Because the abyss between what we are and what we would like to be has to be bridged somehow. That was why fictions were born: so that, through living this vicarious, transient, precarious, but also passionate and fascinating life that fiction transports us to, we can incorporate the impossible into the possible and our existence can be both reality and unreality, history and fable, concrete life and marvellous adventure. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

The naive idea that, through education, one can transmit culture to all of society is destroying 'higher culture', because the only way of achieving this universal democratization of culture is by impoverishing culture, making it ever more superficial. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

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