Mario Vargas Llosa

I don't want to finish my life not being alive. I think that is the saddest thing that can happen to a…

— Mario Vargas Llosa

When I was young, when I started to write, we were totally convinced that literature was a kind of weapon.

— Mario Vargas Llosa

“No me preguntes por qué, porque ni muerta te lo voy a decir. Nunca te voy a decir que te quiero aunque…

— Mario Vargas Llosa

“Make no mistake: patriotism is a religion, the enemy of lucidity. It is pure obscurantism, an act of faith.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

I remember how my world expanded in amazing fashion by that magical operation of translating words into images, and images into stories.

— Mario Vargas Llosa

The novels that have fascinated me most are the ones that have reached me less through the channels of the intellect or…

— 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…

— 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

“they knew what we’re doing for them, they’d kiss our feet. But mentally they are closer to the crocodile and the hippopotamus…

— Mario Vargas Llosa

“This “manna from heaven” was being squandered because of the laziness and stupidity of the savages who refused to work as harvesters…

— Mario Vargas Llosa

The secret to happiness, at least to peace of mind, is knowing how to separate sex from love. And, if possible, eliminating…

— Mario Vargas Llosa

“managers did that as a warning but also for amusement. They enjoyed it. Making people suffer, competing in cruelties, was a vice…

— Mario Vargas Llosa

I think if you're impregnated with good literature, with good culture, you're much more difficult to manipulate, and you're much more aware…

— Mario Vargas Llosa

“Each one of us is, successively, not one but many. And these successive personalities that emerge one from the other tend to…

— 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…

— Mario Vargas Llosa

“Among the colonizers there would be not only altruists such as Dr. Livingstone but abusive scoundrels as well, but in the final…

— Mario Vargas Llosa

Good literature always ends up showing those who read it... the inevitable limitation of all power to fulfill human aspirations and desires.

— Mario Vargas Llosa

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

— Mario Vargas Llosa

A good novel is a conjunction of many factors, the main of which is without a doubt, hard work.

— Mario Vargas Llosa

Each book, for me, has been an adventure, a period of time dedicated to study, to document certain facts, to traveling, and…

— Mario Vargas Llosa

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

— Mario Vargas Llosa

I wouldn't reread Sartre today. Compared to everything I've read since, his fiction seems dated and has lost much of its value.

— Mario Vargas Llosa

Do the rhetorical quarrels of bourgeois political parties have anything to do with the interests of the humble and downtrodden?

— Mario Vargas Llosa

“We should not allow patriotism to do violence to our lucidity, our reason, our intelligence.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

The truths that seem most truthful, if you look at them from all sides, if you look at them close up, turn…

— Mario Vargas Llosa

Reality is the richest thing there is, the most important thing there is. Our imagination allows us to live an artificial life…

— Mario Vargas Llosa

What is essential in love is what the French call 'amour fou.' What is that in English? Crazy love? That doesn't sound…

— 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…

— Mario Vargas Llosa

“Roger reached the conclusion that the hero of his childhood and youth was one of the most unscrupulous villains the West had…

— Mario Vargas Llosa

“I discovered that the predisposition for languages is as mysterious as the inclination of certain people for mathematics or music and has…

— 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…

— Mario Vargas Llosa

“O conhecimento tem a ver com a evolução da técnica e das ciências, e a cultura é algo anterior ao conhecimento, uma…

— Mario Vargas Llosa

“You cannot teach creativity—how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of…

— Mario Vargas Llosa

Even though what I enjoy most is literature, I would not want to live only in a world of fiction, cut off…

— Mario Vargas Llosa

Today, everybody is more or less conscious of the total failure of the Cuban revolution to produce wealth, to produce a better…

— Mario Vargas Llosa

To write is a relief from life's problems. It is a way in which you revenge yourself. In art, the writer achieves…

— Mario Vargas Llosa

When I was at university in the Fifties, Latin America was full of dictators. Trujillo was the emblematic figure because, of course,…

— Mario Vargas Llosa

“Scrivere un romanzo è una cerimonia che somiglia allo streap-tease. Come la ragazza che, sotto impudichi riflettori, si libera dei propri indumenti…

— 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…

— 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…

— Mario Vargas Llosa