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

More quotes by 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.
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I write because I'm unhappy. I write because it's a way of fighting unhappiness.
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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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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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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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I have been always fascinated and seduced by history, which I think is very close, very close to literature.
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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 convinced her that her first loyalty isn't to other people, but to her own feelings.
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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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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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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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Its easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it
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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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Journalism is a way of voicing opinion, of participating in the political, social, or cultural debate.
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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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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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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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A good novel is a conjunction of many factors, the main of which is without a doubt, hard work.
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We must mistrust utopias: they usually end in holocausts.
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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.
Mario Vargas Llosa