Quotessence
Home / Authors / Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa Quotes

Writer

Filter quotes by topic

AllLiteratureNovelWritingFictionWayKindThinkingIfsMenPoliticalHumansPleasureReadingKnowsLyingRealYoungAchieveActivityBook

Famous Mario Vargas Llosa Quotes

“In repressing and censoring the literary genre specifically invented to give "the necessity of lying" a place in the world, the Inquisitors achieved exactly the opposite of what they wanted. Theirs was a world without novels, yes, but also a world into which fiction had spread and contaminated practically everything: history, religion, poetry, science, art, speeches, journalism, and the daily habits of people.”

FictionNovelCorruptionInquisition
Author:Mario Vargas Llosa
Create image

“We still are victims, in Latin America, of what we could call 'the revenge of the novel.' We still have great difficulty in our countries in differentiating between fiction and reality. We are traditionally accustomed to mix them in such a way that this is, probably, one of the reasons why we are so impractical and inept in political matters, for instance. But some good came also from this novelization of our whole life. Books such as Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Cortázar's short stories, and Roa Bastos's novels would not have been possible otherwise.”

FictionNovelLatin AmericaInquisition
Author:Mario Vargas Llosa
Create image

“We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.”

ReadingFictionNobel PrizeIn Praise Of Reading And Fiction
Author:Mario Vargas Llosa
Create image

“From the cave to the skyscraper, from the club to weapons of mass destruction, from the tautological life of the tribe to the era of globalization, the fictions of literature have multiplied human experiences, preventing us from succumbing to lethargy, self-absorption, resignation. Nothing has sown so much disquiet, so disturbed our imagination and our desires as the life of lies we add, thanks to literature, to the one we have, so we can be protagonists in the great adventures, the great passions real life will never give us. The lies of literature become truths through us, the readers transformed, infected with longings and, through the fault of fiction, permanently questioning a mediocre reality. Sorcery, when literature offers us the hope of having what we do not have, being what we are not, acceding to that impossible existence where like pagan gods we feel mortal and eternal at the same time, that introduces into our spirits non-conformity and rebellion, which are behind all the heroic deeds that have contributed to the reduction of violence in human relationships. Reducing violence, not ending it. Because ours will always be, fortunately, an unfinished story. That is why we have to continue dreaming, reading, and writing, the most effective way we have found to alleviate our mortal condition, to defeat the corrosion of time, and to transform the impossible into possibility.”

ReadingFictionNobel PrizeIn Praise Of Reading And Fiction
Author:Mario Vargas Llosa
Create image

“Men do not live by truth alone; they also need lies: those that they invent freely, not those that are imposed on them; those that appear as they are, not smuggled in beneath the clothes of history. Fiction enriches their existence, completes them and, fleetingly, compensates them for this tragic condition which is our lot: always to desire and dream more than we can actually achieve.”

MenNeedsDreamLyingDesireExistenceFictionAchieveConditionsClothesTragicLive By
Book:Making Waves: Essays
Create image

“This fact was something I also learned from this first novel that I needed personal experience to invent, to fantasize, to create fiction, but at the same time I needed some distance, some perspective on this experience in order to feel free enough to manipulate it and to transform it into fiction. If the experience is very close, I feel inhibited. I have never been able to write fiction about something that has happened to me recently. If the closeness of the real reality, of living reality, is to have a persuasive effect on my imagination, I need a distance, a distance in time and in space.”

IfsNeedsFeelsWritingFirstsRealEnoughFactsRealityAbleOrderImaginationSpaceFictionNovelHappenedEffectsPerspectiveNeededDistanceManipulateMy ImaginationPersonal ExperiencesClosenessPersuasiveLiving Reality
Book:A Writer's Reality
Create image