Mario Vargas Llosa Quotes


"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
(Related: Creativity, Help, Writer)

"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
(Related: Business, Lonely, Memories, Obsessions, Rest, World, Writing)

"There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity."
- Mario Vargas Llosa
(Related: Creation, Literary)

"Prosperity or egalitarianism - you have to choose. I favor freedom - you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion."
- Mario Vargas Llosa
(Related: Equality, Sacrifice, Freedom, Illusion, Prosperity)

"Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections."
- Mario Vargas Llosa
(Related: Democracy, Elections)

"It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around."
- Mario Vargas Llosa
(Related: Animals)

"If you are killed because you are a writer, that's the maximum expression of respect, you know."
- Mario Vargas Llosa
(Related: Expression, Respect, Writer)

"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
(Related: Justification, Pleasure)

"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
(Related: Life, Lie, Dream, Circumstances, Illusion, Literary)