Mario Vargas Llosa Quotes

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

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

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

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 symbol of a setting for a Hemingway story is a boxing ring; for Borges, a library. On the other hand I think Nabokov was a writer quite close to Borges. He had the same rich literary culture, moved with great ease in different languages and traditions, and had a playful approach to literature-literature as an intellectual game, through which, of course, the real truths could appear. But apparently the game was for Nabokov just an exercise devoid of moral substance. ~ 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

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

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

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

Why would anyone who is deeply satisfied with reality, with real life as it is lived, dedicate himself to something as insubstantial and fanciful as the creation of fictional realities? Naturally, those who rebel against lie as it is, using their ability to invent different lives and different people, may do so for any number of reasons, honorable or dishonorable, generous or selfish, complex or banal. The nature of this basic questioning of reality, which to my mind lies at the heart of every literary calling, doesn't matter at all. What matters is that the rejection be strong enough to fuel the enthusiasm for a task as quixotic as tilting at windmills – the slight-of-hand replacement of the concrete, objective world of life as it is lived with the subtle and ephemeral world of fiction. ~ Mario Vargas Llosa

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

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

Reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life ~ 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

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

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

An inseparable complement to the exoticism in his stories is the erudition, the bits of specialized knowledge, usually literary, but also philological, historical, philosophical, or theological. This knowledge, which borders on but never oversteps the bounds of pedantry, is quite freely flaunted. But the point is not to show off Borges's wide acquaintance with different cultures. Rather, it is a key element in his creative strategy, the aim of which was to imbue his stories with a certain colorfulness, to endow them with an atmosphere all their own. In other words Borges's learning by his use of exotic settings and characters fulfills an exclusively literary function, which, in twisting the erudition around and making it sometimes decorative, sometimes symbolic, subordinates it to the task at hand. In this way Borges's theology, philosophy, linguistics and so forth, lose their original character, take on the quality of fiction, and, becoming part and parcel of a literary fantasy, are turned into literature. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[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

In this country, in one way or another, everyone had bean, was, or would be part of the regime. "The worst thing that can happen to a Dominican is to be intelligent or competent," he had once heard Agustín Cabral say ...and the words had been etched in his mind: "Because sooner or later Trujillo will call upon him to serve the regime, or his person, and when he calls, one is not permitted to say no." [Agustín Cabral] was proof of this truth....As Estrella Sadhalá always said, the Goat had taken from people the sacred attribute given to them by God: their free will. ~ 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

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

We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal. ~ 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

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

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 Laura was so prolific with poems, and in truth she was, then what was the problem with Megan's request? Couldn't Laura, with a little doing, keep stringing together line after line of words and construct, in time, a novel? It seemed logical, but there was the matter of finding an idea and sustaining it. Only fire could do that. The fire of rebellion.
Mario Vargas Llosa had not used the term "fire" exactly, but rather had discussed the presence of "seditious roots" that could "dynamite the world" the writer inhabited. He claimed that writing stories was an exercise in freedom and quarreling - out-and-out rebellion, whether or not the writer was conscious of it. And this rebellion, Vargas Llosa reminded his readers, was why the Spanish Inquisition had strictly censored works of fiction, prohibiting them for three hundred years in the American colonies. ~ L.L. Barkat

I told myself that in the country of my birth, from which I was disengaged in an increasingly irreversible way, there undoubtedly were many men and women like him, basically decent people who had dreamed all their lives of the economic, social, cultural, and political progress that would transform Peru into a modern, prosperous, democratic society with opportunities open to all, only to find themselves repeatedly frustrated, and, like Uncle Ataulfo, had reached old age - the very brink of death - bewildered, asking themselves why we were moving backward instead of advancing and were worse off now with more discrimination, inequality, violence, and insecurity than when they were starting out ~ Edith Grossman

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

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

Cheap, sentimental things ~ Edith Grossman

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

Writing fiction is the best thing there is because absolutely everything is possible! ~ Mario Vargas-Llosa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the cave to the skyscraper, from the club to weapons of mass destruction, from the tautological life of the tribe to the era of globalization, the fictions of literature have multiplied human experiences, preventing us from succumbing to lethargy, self-absorption, resignation. Nothing has sown so much disquiet, so disturbed our imagination and our desires as the life of lies we add, thanks to literature, to the one we have, so we can be protagonists in the great adventures, the great passions real life will never give us. The lies of literature become truths through us, the readers transformed, infected with longings and, through the fault of fiction, permanently questioning a mediocre reality. Sorcery, when literature offers us the hope of having what we do not have, being what we are not, acceding to that impossible existence where like pagan gods we feel mortal and eternal at the same time, that introduces into our spirits non-conformity and rebellion, which are behind all the heroic deeds that have contributed to the reduction of violence in human relationships. Reducing violence, not ending it. Because ours will always be, fortunately, an unfinished story. That is why we have to continue dreaming, reading, and writing, the most effective way we have found to alleviate our mortal condition, to defeat the corrosion of time, and to transform the impossible into possibility. ~ Mario Vargas Llosa

It is not bad that the main beneficiaries of freedom criticize open societies, where there is much that can be criticized. It is bad if they do so by taking the side of those who seek to destroy these open societies, replacing them with authoritarian regimes, as in Venezuela or Cuba. When many artists and intellectuals betray democratic ideals, they are not betraying abstract principles, but rather the thousands and millions of flesh-and-blood people who, under dictatorships, resist and fight to gain freedom. But the saddest thing is that this betrayal of the victims does not come from principles and convictions but rather from professional opportunism and posturing, gestures and actions adapted to circumstance. Many artists and intellectuals in our times have become very cheap. ~ 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

Nostalgia is cowardice ~ Mario Vargas-Llosa

Writing is a compensatory activity, and literature abounds in cases like his. Borges's pages teem with knives, crimes, and scenes of torture, but the cruelty is kept at a distance by his fine sense of irony and by the cool rationalism of his prose, which never falls into sensationalism or the purely emotional. This lends a statuesque quality to the physical horror, giving it the nature of a work of art set in an unreal world. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

As
Vargas Llosa has said, "Democracy is an event that provokes yawns in the countries in which rule of law exists."49 ~ Pope Benedict XVI

General Mario Vargas Salinas, now retired from Bolivia's Eighth Army Division, was one of the young army officers present at Guevara's burial. It was his duty to accompany an old dump truck carrying the bodies of the six dead rebels, including that of "Che" Guevara, to the airstrip in Vallegrande, Bolivia. Knowing that the facts surrounding the burials were leaking out, he decided that after 28 years the world should know what had happened to "Che" Guevara's body. At the time, Captain Vargas, who had also led the ambush in which Tamara "Tania" Bunke, Guevara's lover, was shot dead, said that Guevara was buried early on the morning of October 11th, 1967, at the end of the town's landing strip. After the gruesome facts became known, the Bolivian government ordered the army to find Guevara's remains for a proper burial.
General Gary Prado Salmón, retired, had been the commander of the unit that had captured Guevara. He confirmed General Vargas' statement and added that the guerrilla fighters had been burned, before dumping their bodies into a mass grave, dug by a bulldozer, at the end of the Vallegrande airstrip. He explained that the body of "Che" Guevara had been buried in a separate gravesite under the runway. The morning after the burials, "Che" Guevara's brother arrived in Vallegrande, hoping to see his brother's remains. Upon asking, he was told by the police that it was too late. Talking to some of the army officers, he was told lies or perhaps just differing account ~ Hank Bracker

Fiction is a lie covering up a deep truth. ~ Maria Vargas Llosa

It is amazing how may drivers, even at the Formula One Level, think that the brakes are for slowing the car down. ~ Mario Andretti

There is no substitute to living in one's native land, struggling and winning with one's own people. ~ Mario I. Miclat

Like other antitrust agencies we make our assessment of a merger or antitrust case based on its impact on our jurisdiction, and not on the nationality of the companies. This is exactly what the U.S. antitrust agencies, the Justice Department and the FTC, do. ~ Mario Monti

You know, I think Marco Rubio would be a spectacular candidate for vice president. I think he would energize the country. I think he has a great story. He's bright. He's articulate. ~ Mario Diaz-Balart

Thank You Mario! But Our Princess is in another castle! ~ TOAD, Super Mario Bros.

They made it personal when they shot Pop. It is not business, it's personal. ~ Mario Puzo

Imagine what would have happened had the logicist endeavor been entirely successful. This would have implied that mathematics stems fully from logic-literally from the laws of thought. But how could such a deductive science so marvelously fit natural phenomena? What is the relation between formal logic (maybe we should even say human formal logic) and the cosmos? The answer did not become any clearer after Hilbert and Godel. Now all that existed was an incomplete formal "game," expressed in mathematical language. How could models based on such an "unreliable" system produce deep insights about the universe and its workings? ~ Mario Livio

I was badly mauled by people in New York State for being against the death penalty for 12 years. ~ Mario Cuomo

Many young men started down a false path to their true destiny. Time and fortune usually set them aright. ~ Mario Puzo

I told them that my grandfather had died in the Great Crash of 1929 - a stockbroker jumped out of a window and crushed him and his pushcart down below. ~ Mario Cuomo

What hurts is not being homosexual, but they tell it in your face as if you were a plague. ~ Chavela Vargas

The way the bankers have kind of toppled the way money is distributed, and taken most of it into their own hands, is as good as Stalin or Hitler. ~ Mario Batali