Mario Vargas Llosa Quotes
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I don't want to finish my life not being alive. I think that is the saddest thing that can happen to a person. I want to keep living to the end.
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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.
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I am not going to participate in professional politics again.
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In general, a writer would like to think that the best book that he has written is the book that he is writing, and the next book will be even better. Maybe if this is not true, it is very useful to keep the illusion alive.
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I would like my novels to be read the way I read the novels I love.
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There are so many new young poets, novelists, and playwrights who are much less politically committed than the former generations. The trend is to be totally concentrated on the literary aesthetic and to consider politics to be something dirty that shouldn't be mixed with an artistic or a literary vocation.
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If you are killed because you are a writer, that's the maximum expression of respect, you know.
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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.
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In 1975, I went to the Dominican Republic for eight months during the shooting of a film based on my novel 'Captain Pantoja and the Special Service.' It was during this period I heard and read about Trujillo.
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There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.
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Faulkner was the first novelist I read with pen and paper in hand because his technique stunned me.
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My three years in politics was very instructive about the way in which the appetite for political power can destroy a human mind, destroy principles and values, and transform people into little monsters.
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I think everybody, or the great majority of human beings, have this aspiration to become other: to live a different identity, at least for a while.
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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 of the dangers that powers represent.
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Literature creates a fraternity within human diversity and eclipses the frontiers erected among men and women by ignorance, ideologies, religions, languages, and stupidity.
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In general, I think my freedom of invention is not limited when I use historical characters.
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I think that literature has the important effect of creating free, independent, critical citizens who cannot be manipulated.
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Reading changed dreams into life and life into dreams.
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Good literature erects bridges between different peoples, and by having us enjoy, suffer, or feel surprise, unites us beneath the languages, beliefs, habits, customs, and prejudices that separate us.