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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
Young
Teaching
Writing
Writer
Kind
Teach
Good
Within
Would
Help
Like
Helping
Cannot
Discover
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Creativity

More quotes by Mario Vargas Llosa

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Even though what I enjoy most is literature, I would not want to live only in a world of fiction, cut off from the rest of life. No - I want to always have a foot in the street, to be inmersed in the activities of my contemporaries, in the times, in the place where I live.
Mario Vargas Llosa
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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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A good novel is a conjunction of many factors, the main of which is without a doubt, hard work.
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I think in a country like mine, violence is at the root of all human relations.
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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.
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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One can't fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser.
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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When I was young, when I started to write, we were totally convinced that literature was a kind of weapon.
Mario Vargas Llosa
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I learned to read at the age of five, in Brother Justiniano's class at the De la Salle Academy in Cochabamba, Bolivia. It is the most important thing that has ever happened to me. 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.
Mario Vargas Llosa
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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.
Mario Vargas Llosa
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It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
Mario Vargas Llosa
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Do the rhetorical quarrels of bourgeois political parties have anything to do with the interests of the humble and downtrodden?
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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Its easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it
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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We must mistrust utopias: they usually end in holocausts.
Mario Vargas Llosa
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I have been always fascinated and seduced by history, which I think is very close, very close to literature.
Mario Vargas Llosa
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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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It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.
Mario Vargas Llosa