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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
Must
Utopias
Mistrust
Utopia
Holocaust
Usually
Ends

More quotes by Mario Vargas Llosa

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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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When I was young, when I started to write, we were totally convinced that literature was a kind of weapon.
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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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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.
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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 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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One can't fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser.
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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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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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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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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.
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Reading was such an enrichment of my life. And it was that pleasure that I had as a very young reader probably that is the origin of my vocation.
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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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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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Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections.
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Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories.
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Journalism is a way of voicing opinion, of participating in the political, social, or cultural debate.
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Its easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it
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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