Mario Vargas Llosa Quotes

Why should those persons who used literature as an ornament or pretext have any more right to be considered real writers than Pedro Camacho, who lived only to write? Because they had read or at least knew that they should have read Proust, Faulkner, Joyce, while Pedro Camacho was very nearly illiterate?

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.

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.

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

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

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

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.

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

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

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

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