Mario Vargas Llosa Quotes

34 Sourced Quotes

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

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
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
You can't make facts fit the rules, it is the other way round. The rules have to be adopted to fit the facts.

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
It is easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it.

Mario Vargas Llosa
We all believe in the regulations, but you have to know how to interpret them.

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

Mario Vargas Llosa
Every thing is done halfway in Peru, and that is why everything goes wrong.

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

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...

Mario Vargas Llosa
Now we have Peronism that is everything: it's the far right and its the center, it's left centrist and is also extreme leftist, it is democracy and is also terrorism, its demagogy is also insanity... Peronism is everything.

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

Mario Vargas Llosa
Prosperity or egalitarianism – you have to choose. I favour freedom – you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.

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
Lima frightened him, it was too big, you could lose yourself in it and never find your way home; the people on the street were total strangers.

Mario Vargas Llosa
Good literature erects bridges between different peoples, and by having us enjoy, suffer, or feel surprise, unites us beneath the languages, beliefs, habits, customs, and prejudices that separate us.

Mario Vargas Llosa
Reading changed dreams into life and life into dreams.

Mario Vargas Llosa
He is always furious, on account of what he finds out or what he doesn't find out.

Mario Vargas Llosa
Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. 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
I convinced her that her first loyalty isn't to other people, but to her own feelings.

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

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
When you start having bad luck, there isn't an end to it.

Mario Vargas Llosa