Top 93 Mario Vargas Llosa Sayings
#1. Life is a shitstorm, in which art is our only umbrella.
(spoken by character in a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa)
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#2. He (Mario Vargas Llosa) looks grave, transported. And there, I think, is the personality that wrote the books: one in which a subversive comic sense and appetite for the ridiculous jostle with an intense, statesmanlike seriousness about the business of being alive.
Tim Martin
#3. I'd always admired the intellectuals who had made the transition into politics - Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru, Vaclav Havel in the Czech Republic, Carlos Fuentes in Mexico - but I knew that many of them had failed, and in any event, I wasn't exactly in their league.
Michael Ignatieff
#4. 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
#5. Because happiness was temporal, individual, in exceptional circumstances twofold, on extremely rare occasions tripartite, and never collective, civic.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#6. 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
#7. A good novel is a conjunction of many factors, the main of which is without a doubt, hard work.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#8. 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
#10. 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
#11. I know what a man feels close to the woman he loves, but he's affraid to do anything
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. A writer is not always conscious of the influences he has received.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#16. 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
#17. Revolution will free society of its afflictions, while science will free the individual of his.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#18. Journalism is a way of voicing opinion, of participating in the political, social, or cultural debate.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#19. When you start looking for purity in politics, you eventually get to unreality.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#20. 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
#22. It's beautiful, as long as you concentrate on the landscape and the birds, because everything man-made there is ugly.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. In general, I think my freedom of invention is not limited when I use historical characters.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#31. I have been always fascinated and seduced by history, which I think is very close, very close to literature.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Probably there are no longer any societies in which the best people are attracted to civic duties.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#35. There were so many problems; the hydra had so many heads, iniquity raised its head everywhere one looked.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#36. A novel which persuades us of its truth is true however full of lies it may be
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#37. 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
#38. They had forgotten the abuses, the murders, the corruption, the spying, the isolation, the fear: horror had become myth. Everybody had jobs and there wasn't so much crime.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#39. 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
#41. It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#42. Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#43. No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#44. I was very young and lived with my grandparents in a villa with white walls in the Calle Ocharan, in Miraflores.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#45. I convinced her that her first loyalty isn't to other people, but to her own feelings.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. I have a chest full of all the insults, villainies, and infamies a man is capable of withstanding ... If you become famous, you will have to go through that.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#49. 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
#50. There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#51. 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
#53. 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
#54. Living is worth the effort if only because without life we could not read or imagine stories.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. Writing fiction is the best thing there is because absolutely everything is possible!
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. Do the rhetorical quarrels of bourgeois political parties have anything to do with the interests of the humble and downtrodden?
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#63. North American society could not have reached its state of high development and modernity had it not been an open society.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Until then he had believed they justified colonialism: Christianity, civilization, and commerce.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#67. Prosperity or egalitarianism - you have to choose. I favor freedom - you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#68. A Criminal is the case of surplus of human energy directed in the wrong direction.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#70. When I was young, when I started to write, we were totally convinced that literature was a kind of weapon.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#71. I think in a country like mine, violence is at the root of all human relations.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#75. 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 ...
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#76. 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
#77. I write because I'm unhappy. I write because it's a way of fighting unhappiness.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#78. 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
#79. Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. Science is still only a candle glimmering in a great pitch-dark cavern.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#84. If you are killed because you are a writer, that's the maximum expression of respect, you know.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#85. 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
#86. 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
#88. Because in the civilization of the spectacle, intellectuals are of interest only if they play the fashion game and become clowns.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#89. 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
#90. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
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