Quote

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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Mario Vargas Llosa
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: March 28
Dramaturge
Essayist
Film Director
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Philosopher
Playwright
Politician
Prosaist
Work
Course
Way
Books
Crux
Always
Literature
Center
Things
Living
Interested
Doesn
Couldn
Book
Outside
Many
Imagine
Mean
Courses

More quotes by Mario Vargas Llosa

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One can't fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser.
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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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It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.
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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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If you are killed because you are a writer, that's the maximum expression of respect, you know.
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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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I convinced her that her first loyalty isn't to other people, but to her own feelings.
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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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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.
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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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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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Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections.
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I think in a country like mine, violence is at the root of all human relations.
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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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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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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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It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
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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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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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