Mario Vargas Llosa: Quotes about literature

Mario Vargas Llosa is Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, and essayist. Explore interesting quotes on literature.
Mario Vargas Llosa: 60   quotes 8   likes

“Literature creates a fraternity within human diversity and eclipses the frontiers erected among men and women by ignorance, ideologies, religions, languages, and stupidity.”

Mario Vargas Llosa

Nobel Lecture (2010)

Women , Men , Stupidity , Religion

“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
Life , Imagination , Literature , Revenge

“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.”

Mario Vargas Llosa

Nobel Lecture (2010)

History , Literature , Idea , Learning

“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

Nobel Lecture (2010)

People , Feeling , Literature , Suffering