Top 35 Mario Vargas Llosa Quotes

I remember how my world expanded in amazing fashion by that magical operation of translating words into images, and images into stories.

Eroticism has its own moral justification because it says that pleasure is enough for me; it is a statement of the individual’s sovereignty.

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.

My three years in politics was very instructive about the way in which the appetite for political power can destroy a human mind, destroy principles and values, and transform people into little monsters.

I think that literature is something that embraces a much larger experience than politics. It’s an expression of what is life, of what are all the dimensions of life. But politics is one among others.

Literature is dangerous: it awakens a rebellious attitude in us.

If you are killed because you are a writer, that’s the maximum expression of respect, you know.

In fiction, you are not limited by real facts. You can manipulate reality; you can invent without being disloyal to the essence of history.

What is essential in love is what the French call ‘amour fou.’ What is that in English? Crazy love? That doesn’t sound as beautiful. It’s a total kind of love that not only embraces feelings, actions, but a kind of understanding of the world from the perspective of love.

Couldn’t imagine any other way of living, outside of books, outside my work. Which doesn’t mean I am not interested in other things, of course – I am interested in many things. But the center, the crux, is always literature.

I remember, when I was young, to have a literary or artistic vocation was really dramatic because you were so isolated from the common world. You felt that you were marginal, and if you dared to try to organise your life around your vocation, you knew you’d be completely segregated.

In general, I think my freedom of invention is not limited when I use historical characters.

Good novel is a conjunction of many factors, the main of which is, without a doubt, hard work. There are many things behind a good novel, but in particular, there is a lot of work – a lot of patience, a lot of stubbornness, and a critical spirit.

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

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

Iraq is better without Saddam Hussein than with Saddam Hussein. Without a doubt.

I wouldn’t reread Sartre today. Compared to everything I’ve read since, his fiction seems dated and has lost much of its value.

Part of the reasons I have lived the life I have is because I wanted to have an adventurous life. But my best adventures are more literary than political.

It isn’t true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

I don’t want to finish my life not being alive. I think that is the saddest thing that can happen to a person. I want to keep living to the end.

I learnt to read when I was five, and I think that is the most important thing that happened to me.

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

I think if you’re impregnated with good literature, with good culture, you’re much more difficult to manipulate, and you’re much more aware of the dangers that powers represent.

I am in favor of economic freedom, but I am not a conservative.

I thought that, when I came to New York, that I would have a very life here for three months or three and a half months. And my impression is that it won’t be so quiet as I wanted.

I love stories, and my life is principally concentrated on stories, but not with a pretense of scientific precision.

Today, everybody is more or less conscious of the total failure of the Cuban revolution to produce wealth, to produce a better standard of living for the Cubans. With the exception of small radical parties, Latin Americans know that it’s a brutal dictatorship and the longest in Latin American history.

Only if I reach 100 years old will I write a very complete autobiography. Not before.

The novels that have fascinated me most are the ones that have reached me less through the channels of the intellect or reason than bewitched me.

Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections.

I am not going to participate in professional politics again.

We were trained as writers with the idea that literature is something that can change reality, that it’s not just a very sophisticated entertainment but a way to act.

In general, a writer would like to think that the best book that he has written is the book that he is writing, and the next book will be even better. Maybe if this is not true, it is very useful to keep the illusion alive.

When I was young, I was a passionate reader of Sartre. I’ve read the American novelists, in particular the lost generation – Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos – especially Faulkner. Of the authors I read when I was young, he is one of the few who still means a lot to me.

When I was growing up, the Spanish-speaking world was Balkanized. We were isolated. We didn’t know what was happening in cultural terms in Ecuador, Colombia and Chile. Nowadays, this has changed a lot – fortunately for writers and readers. There is much more integration.