Mario Vargas Llosa Quotes
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The Nobel prize is a fairytale for a week and a nightmare for a year. You can't imagine the pressure to give interviews, to go to book fairs.
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Good novel is a conjunction of many factors, the main of which is, without a doubt, hard work. There are many things behind a good novel, but in particular, there is a lot of work - a lot of patience, a lot of stubbornness, and a critical spirit.
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Journalism is a way of voicing opinion, of participating in the political, social, or cultural debate.
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Sartre said that wars were acts and that, with literature, you could produce changes in history. Now, I don't think literature doesn't produce changes, but I think the social and political effect of literature is much less controllable than I thought.
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I wouldn't reread Sartre today. Compared to everything I've read since, his fiction seems dated and has lost much of its value.
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Everyone is in a rush in New York, even in restaurants and in cafes. You dont have the serenity. That, I think, is very important in order to read.
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When I was growing up, the Spanish-speaking world was Balkanized. We were isolated. We didn't know what was happening in cultural terms in Ecuador, Colombia and Chile. Nowadays, this has changed a lot - fortunately for writers and readers. There is much more integration.
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I was absolutely convinced that I wouldn't win the Nobel Prize. My impression was that the Nobel Prize in Literature was given to people more or less affiliated with, let's say, socialist ideas, and that was not my case.
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I am in favor of economic freedom, but I am not a conservative.
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I love stories, and my life is principally concentrated on stories, but not with a pretense of scientific precision.
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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.
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To write is a relief from life's problems. It is a way in which you revenge yourself. In art, the writer achieves utopia. But any attempt to achieve social utopia is bound to catastrophe. If you want a society of saints, the result is hell, repression, totalitarianism, and persecution.
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When I was young, I was a passionate reader of Sartre. I've read the American novelists, in particular the lost generation - Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos - especially Faulkner. Of the authors I read when I was young, he is one of the few who still means a lot to me.
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Each book, for me, has been an adventure, a period of time dedicated to study, to document certain facts, to traveling, and also to fantasize and to invent.
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Eroticism is born at a time in civilisation when sexual instinct becomes deanimalised and enriched with contributions from art and from literature. A world of theatricality emerges around the act of love.
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I remember how my world expanded in amazing fashion by that magical operation of translating words into images, and images into stories.
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Literature is dangerous: it awakens a rebellious attitude in us.
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I think that literature is something that embraces a much larger experience than politics. It's an expression of what is life, of what are all the dimensions of life. But politics is one among others.
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Latin America seemed to be a land where there were only dictators, revolutionaries, catastrophes. Now we know that Latin America can produce also artists, musicians, painters, thinkers, and novelists.
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In fiction, you are not limited by real facts. You can manipulate reality; you can invent without being disloyal to the essence of history.
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Good literature always ends up showing those who read it... the inevitable limitation of all power to fulfill human aspirations and desires.
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No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.
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Prosperity or egalitarianism - you have to choose. I favor freedom - you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.
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Iraq is better without Saddam Hussein than with Saddam Hussein. Without a doubt.