He is a Peruvian-Spanish writer, politician, journalist, essayist, and Nobel Prize laureate. Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America’s most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading authors of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a larger international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. He was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”.
(1936 – )
– Mario Vargas Llosa Quotes –
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
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
If you are killed because you are a writer, that’s the maximum expression of respect, you know.
~ Mario Vargas Llosa
There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.
~ Mario Vargas Llosa
No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.
~ Mario Vargas Llosa
It isn’t true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
~ 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
Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections.
~ Mario Vargas Llosa
Prosperity or egalitarianism – you have to choose. I favor freedom – you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.
~ Mario Vargas Llosa
It is easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it.
~ Mario Vargas Llosa
When you start having bad luck, there isn’t an end to it.
~ Mario Vargas Llosa
Reading changed dreams into life and life into dreams.
~ Mario Vargas Llosa
A clean conscience might help you to get into heaven. but it won’t help your career.
~ 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
Every thing is done halfway in Peru, and that is why everything goes wrong.
~ 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
We all believe in the regulations, but you have to know how to interpret them. — 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
