Mario Vargas Llosa quotes - page 2

We all believe in the regulations, but you have to know how to interpret them. (Mario Vargas Llosa)

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.

Mario Vargas Llosa

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

Mario Vargas Llosa

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

Mario Vargas Llosa

Revolution will free society of its afflictions, while science will free the individual of his.

Mario Vargas Llosa

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.

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

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

Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life.

Mario Vargas Llosa

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.

Mario Vargas Llosa

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... (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

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Journalism is a way of voicing opinion, of participating in the political, social, or cultural debate.

Mario Vargas Llosa

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

Mario Vargas Llosa

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

Mario Vargas Llosa

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

Mario Vargas Llosa

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.

Mario Vargas Llosa

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

Mario Vargas Llosa

I 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.

Mario Vargas Llosa

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Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa - Image

Photo: power axle, CC BY 2.0

Occupation: Peruvian Novelist
Born: March 28, 1936
Died: April 13, 2025
Quotes count: 45
Wikipedia: Mario Vargas Llosa

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