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We must mistrust utopias: they usually end in holocausts.

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
Utopias
Mistrust
Utopia
Holocaust
Usually
Ends
Must

More quotes by 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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It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
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The secret to happiness, at least to peace of mind, is knowing how to separate sex from love. And, if possible, eliminating romantic love from your life, which is the love that makes you suffer. That way, I assure you, you live with greater tranquility and enjoy things more.
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I think in a country like mine, violence is at the root of all human relations.
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 convinced her that her first loyalty isn't to other people, but to her own feelings.
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It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.
Mario Vargas Llosa
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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.
Mario Vargas Llosa
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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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Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections.
Mario Vargas Llosa
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One can't fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser.
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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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.
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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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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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.
Mario Vargas Llosa
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If you are killed because you are a writer, that's the maximum expression of respect, you know.
Mario Vargas Llosa
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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.
Mario Vargas Llosa