Mario Vargas Llosa Quotes

“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”

“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.”

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

“Political correctness is the enemy of freedom because it rejects honesty and authenticity. We have to tackle it as the distortion of the truth.”

“Every thing is done halfway in Peru, and that is why everything goes wrong.”

“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.”

“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…”

“Reading changed dreams into life and life into dreams.”

“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.”

“Writing stories was not easy. When they were turned into words, projects withered on the paper and ideas and images failed. How to reanimate them? Fortunately, the masters were there, teachers to learn from and examples to follow. Flaubert taught me that talent is unyielding discipline and long patience. Faulkner, that form – writing and structure – elevates or impoverishes subjects. Martorell, Cervantes, Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, Conrad, Thomas Mann, that scope and ambition are as important in a novel as stylistic dexterity and narrative strategy. Sartre, that words are acts, that a novel, a play, or an essay, engaged with the present moment and better options, can change the course of history. Camus and Orwell, that a literature stripped of morality is inhuman, and Malraux that heroism and the epic are as possible in the present as is the time of the Argonauts, the Odyssey, and the Iliad.”

“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.”

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

“Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“A clean conscience might help you to get into heaven. but it won't help your career.”

“We all believe in the regulations, but you have to know how to interpret them.”

“He is always furious, on account of what he finds out or what he doesn't find out.”