Mario Vargas Llosa: Cytaty po angielsku

“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.”

“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”

“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.”

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

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

“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…”

“One can't fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”