Mario Vargas Llosa quotes
Mario Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian writer, journalist, and public intellectual widely recognized as one of Latin America's most influential novelists. His works explore themes of power, politics, and society, blending fiction with historical and social commentary. He has received numerous international awards, including the Nobel Prize in Literature. Here are 45 of his quotes:
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
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.
Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa
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power axle,
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Occupation: Peruvian Novelist
Born: March 28, 1936
Died: April 13, 2025
Quotes count: 45
Wikipedia: Mario Vargas Llosa
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