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 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.

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About Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa was a 20th-century peruvian novelist and writer. Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquess of Vargas Llosa was a Peruvian novelist, journalist, essayist and politician. Vargas Llosa was one of the most significant Latin American novelists and essayists and one of the leading writers of his generation. Read more on Wikipedia →

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