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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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Mario Vargas Llosa
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: March 28
Dramaturge
Essayist
Film Director
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Philosopher
Playwright
Politician
Prosaist
Change
Ideas
Trained
Something
Sophisticated
Way
Entertainment
Writers
Literature
Idea
Reality

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One can't fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser.
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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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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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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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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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A good novel is a conjunction of many factors, the main of which is without a doubt, hard work.
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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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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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It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.
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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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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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I completely believe that - literature for me is a way of life. That's probably true of all writers or all artists. I think in the end this kind of activity absorbs one in such a way that it becomes one's way of life.
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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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I think in a country like mine, violence is at the root of all human relations.
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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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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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I write because I'm unhappy. I write because it's a way of fighting unhappiness.
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