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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
Holocaust
Usually
Ends
Must
Utopias
Mistrust
Utopia

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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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It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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Its easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it
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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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One can't fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser.
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I write because I'm unhappy. I write because it's a way of fighting unhappiness.
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Journalism is a way of voicing opinion, of participating in the political, social, or cultural debate.
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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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Do the rhetorical quarrels of bourgeois political parties have anything to do with the interests of the humble and downtrodden?
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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.
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It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
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Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections.
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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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