Quotes by Mario Vargas Llosa

“One can't fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser.”

“It is as if Little Red Riding Hood had asked the wolf: "Dear Grandmother, what is the truth for?" And the wolf had replied: "The truth helps me tell you better lies.”

“Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.”

“You cannot teach creativityhow 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”

“We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like wri...”

“From the cave to the skyscraper, from the club to weapons of mass destruction, from the tautological life of the tribe to the era of globalization, the fictions of literature have multiplied human ...”

“Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure...but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams,...”

“We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.”

“Living is worth the effort if only because without life we could not read or imagine stories.”

“Because of literature we can decipher, at least partially, the hieroglyphic that existence tends to be for the great majority of human beings.”

“It is the case that, albeit to a lesser extent, all fictions make their readers live "the impossible", taking them out of themselves, breaking down barriers, and making them share, by identifying w...”

“Fictions exist because of this fact. Because we have only one life, and our desires and fantasies demand a thousand lives. Because the abyss between what we are and what we would like to be has to ...”

“The search for liberty is simply part of the greater search for a world where respect for the rule of law and human rights is universala world free of dictators, terrorists, warmongers and fanatics...”

“The writers job is to write with rigor, with commitment, to defend what they believe with all the talent they have. I think thats part of the moral obligation of a writer, which cannot be only pure...”

“Whether religious or racial, anti-Semitism is always repugnant, one of the most destructive manifestations of human stupidity and evil. What is profoundly expressed in it is man's traditional mistr...”

“One of the most damaging myths of our time is that poor countries live in poverty because of a conspiracy of the rich countries, who arrange things so as to keep them underdeveloped, in order to ex...”

“Honor, vengeance, that rigorous religion, those punctilicious codes of conduct - how to explain their existence here, at the end of the world, among people who possessed nothing but the rags and th...”

“Instead of speaking of justice and injustice, freedom and oppression, classless society and class society, they talked in terms of God and the Devil.”

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

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