34 Quotes By Mario Vargas Llosa, The Recipient Of Nobel Prize In Literature
One can't fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser.
Almost seventy years later I remember clearly how the magic of translating the words in books into images enriched my life, breaking the barriers of time and space...
Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.
Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.
Its easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it
But what do I have? The things I'm told and the things I tell, that's all. And as far as I know, that never yet made anyone fly.
Life is a shitstorm, in which art is our only umbrella." (spoken by character in a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa)
I convinced her that her first loyalty isn't to other people, but to her own feelings.
You cannot teach creativity—how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.” Mario Vargas Llosa
Science is still only a candle glimmering in a great pitch-dark cavern.
No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.
Death isn't enough. It doesn't remove the stain. But a slap, a whiplash, square on the face, does. Because a man's face is as sacred as his mother or his wife.
Revolution will free society of its afflictions, while science will free the individual of his.
Well, at heart I knew she'd never be a normal woman. And I didn't want her to be one, because what I loved in her were the indomitable and unpredictable aspects of her personality
Writing fiction is the best thing there is because absolutely everything is possible!
It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.
I was very young and lived with my grandparents in a villa with white walls in the Calle Ocharan, in Miraflores.
I am somewhat allergic to explanations that divide men and women into frozen categories and attribute to each sex its characteristic virtues and shortcomings.
He was a man in the prime of his life, his fifties...broad forehead, aquiline nose, penetrating gaze, the very soul of rectitude and goodness.
Living is worth the effort if only because without life we could not read or imagine stories.
We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.
It's easier to imagine the death of one person than those of a hundred or a thousand. When multiplied, suffering becomes abstract. It's not easy to be moved by abstract things.
Because of literature we can decipher, at least partially, the hieroglyphic that existence tends to be for the great majority of human beings.
Porque a felicidade era temporária, individual, excepcionalmente dual, raríssimas vezes tripartida e nunca coletiva, municipal.
Instead of speaking of justice and injustice, freedom and oppression, classless society and class society, they talked in terms of God and the Devil.
One of the most damaging myths of our time is that poor countries live in poverty because of a conspiracy of the rich countries, who arrange things so as to keep them underdeveloped, in order to exploit them.
They had forgotten the abuses, the murders, the corruption, the spying, the isolation, the fear: horror had become myth. Everybody had jobs and there wasn't so much crime.
Their curses were not aimed at any definite target: they swore at such abstractions as God, the Officers, the Mothers of Others, with more music than meaning.
Because happiness was temporal, individual, in exceptional circumstances twofold, on extremely rare occasions tripartite, and never collective, civic.
