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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

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Mario Vargas Llosa
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: March 28
Dramaturge
Essayist
Film Director
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Philosopher
Playwright
Politician
Prosaist
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Helping
Cannot
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Become
Creativity
Young
Teaching
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Writer
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More quotes by Mario Vargas Llosa

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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.
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I write because I'm unhappy. I write because it's a way of fighting unhappiness.
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There are people with a lot of prejudice, a lot of fear of the unknown. They think that immigration is a danger, when really it is a solution. This is an interesting issue, because it will be a central question of our time.
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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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It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
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The worst thing that can happen to an artist is to be subsidized by the state. It leads to an intellectual and artistic castration.
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We must mistrust utopias: they usually end in holocausts.
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Do the rhetorical quarrels of bourgeois political parties have anything to do with the interests of the humble and downtrodden?
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In my case, literature is a kind of revenge. It's something that gives me what real life can't give me - all the adventures, all the suffering. All the experiences I can only live in the imagination, literature completes.
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I couldn't imagine any other way of living, outside of books, outside my work. Which doesn't mean I am not interested in other things, of course - I am interested in many things. But the center, the crux, is always literature.
Mario Vargas Llosa
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When I was young, when I started to write, we were totally convinced that literature was a kind of weapon.
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One can't fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser.
Mario Vargas Llosa
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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.
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Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections.
Mario Vargas Llosa
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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.
Mario Vargas Llosa
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Journalism is a way of voicing opinion, of participating in the political, social, or cultural debate.
Mario Vargas Llosa
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A novel which persuades us of its truth is true however full of lies it may be
Mario Vargas Llosa
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Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure...but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness.
Mario Vargas Llosa
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Nothing better protects a human being against the stupidity of prejudice, racism, religious or political sectarianism, and exclusivist nationalism than this truth that invariably appears in great literature: that men and women of all nations and places are essentially equal, and only injustice sows among them discrimination, fear, and exploitation.
Mario Vargas Llosa
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A good novel is a conjunction of many factors, the main of which is without a doubt, hard work.
Mario Vargas Llosa