Quotes from Mario Vargas Llosa

probar que hay sitio para la esperanza en las circunstancias más difíciles, es algo que la literatura ha sabido hacer, aunque

Como disciplina intelectual, dijo, «es aburrido leer a los aliados, a quienes coinciden con nuestros puntos de vista. Más interesante es leer al enemigo, al que pone a prueba la solidez de nuestras defensas. Lo que, en verdad, me ha interesado siempre, es averiguar qué tienen de flaco, de débil o de erróneo las ideas en las que creo. ¿Para qué? Para poder enmendarlas o abandonarlas».

Literature is dangerous: it awakens a rebellious attitude in us.

Liberty is inseparable from social justice, and those who dissociate them, sacrificing the first with the purpose of attaining the second more quickly, are the true barbarians of our time.

Today, everybody is more or less conscious of the total failure of the Cuban revolution to produce wealth, to produce a better standard of living for the Cubans. With the exception of small radical parties, Latin Americans know that it's a brutal dictatorship and the longest in Latin American history.

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.

Iraq is better without Saddam Hussein than with Saddam Hussein. Without a doubt.

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.

I think that literature has the important effect of creating free, independent, critical citizens who cannot be manipulated.

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

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

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.

We were trained as writers with the idea that literature is something that can change reality, that it's not just a very sophisticated entertainment but a way to act.

A novel which persuades us of its truth is true however full of lies it may be

The truths that seem most truthful, if you look at them from all sides, if you look at them close up, turn out to be either half truths or lies.

In fiction, you are not limited by real facts. You can manipulate reality; you can invent without being disloyal to the essence of history.

In general, I think my freedom of invention is not limited when I use historical characters.

I think yellow journalism is something that appears everywhere, in the underdeveloped and developed worlds alike.

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.

Its easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it

Journalism is a way of voicing opinion, of participating in the political, social, or cultural debate.

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.

If you live in a country where there is nothing comparable to free information, often literature becomes the only way to be more or less informed about what's going on.

I learnt to read when I was five, and I think that is the most important thing that happened to me.