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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
Usually
Ends
Must
Utopias
Mistrust
Utopia
Holocaust

More quotes by Mario Vargas Llosa

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Journalism is a way of voicing opinion, of participating in the political, social, or cultural debate.
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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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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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A good novel is a conjunction of many factors, the main of which is without a doubt, hard work.
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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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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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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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Do the rhetorical quarrels of bourgeois political parties have anything to do with the interests of the humble and downtrodden?
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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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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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One can't fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser.
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I think in a country like mine, violence is at the root of all human relations.
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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 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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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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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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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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It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.
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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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