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:

When you start having bad luck, there isn't an end to it. (Mario Vargas Llosa)
It is easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it. View quote
Mario Vargas Llosa
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. View quote
Mario Vargas Llosa
No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing. View quote
Mario Vargas Llosa
A clean conscience might help you to get into heaven but it won't help your career. View quote
Mario Vargas Llosa
Every thing is done halfway in Peru, and that is why everything goes wrong. View quote
Mario Vargas Llosa
Do the rhetorical quarrels of bourgeois political parties have anything to do with the interests of the humble and downtrodden? View quote
Mario Vargas Llosa
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. View quote
Mario Vargas Llosa
One can't fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser. View quote
Mario Vargas Llosa
Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present. View quote
Mario Vargas Llosa
Writers are the exorcists of their own demons. (Mario Vargas Llosa)
Science is still only a candle glimmering in a great pitch-dark cavern. View quote
Mario Vargas Llosa
I write because I'm unhappy. I write because it's a way of fighting unhappiness. View quote
Mario Vargas Llosa
Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections. View quote
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. View quote
Mario Vargas Llosa
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around. View quote
Mario Vargas Llosa
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. View quote
Mario Vargas Llosa
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. View quote
Mario Vargas Llosa
Now we have Peronism that is everything: it's the far right and its the center, it's left centrist and is also extreme leftist, it is democracy and is also terrorism, its demagogy is also insanity...Peronism is everything. View quote
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. View quote
Mario Vargas Llosa
He is always furious, on account of what he finds out or what he doesn't find out. (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. View quote
Mario Vargas Llosa
Reading changed dreams into life and life into dreams. View quote
Mario Vargas Llosa
Literature creates a fraternity within human diversity and eclipses the frontiers erected among men and women by ignorance, ideologies, religions, languages, and stupidity. View quote
Mario Vargas Llosa
Political correctness is the enemy of freedom because it rejects honesty and authenticity. We have to tackle it as the distortion of the truth. View quote
Mario Vargas Llosa