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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.

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
State
Artist
Castration
Subsidized
Happens
Artistic
States
Leads
Thing
Intellectual
Worst
Happen

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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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Its easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it
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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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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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I convinced her that her first loyalty isn't to other people, but to her own feelings.
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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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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 completely believe that - literature for me is a way of life. That's probably true of all writers or all artists. I think in the end this kind of activity absorbs one in such a way that it becomes one's way of life.
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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.
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I think in a country like mine, violence is at the root of all human relations.
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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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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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It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.
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Journalism is a way of voicing opinion, of participating in the political, social, or cultural debate.
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North American society could not have reached its state of high development and modernity had it not been an open society.
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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.
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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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A novel which persuades us of its truth is true however full of lies it may be
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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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