Top 90 Mario Vargas Llosa Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

2. “Reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

Featured in: Reading Quotes

3. “Science is still only a candle glimmering in a great pitch-dark cavern.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

4. “Literature is a form of permanent insurrection. Its mission is to arouse, to disturb, to alarm, to keep men in a constant state of dissatisfaction with themselves.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

5. “The secret to a masterpiece is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

6. “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.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

7. “I write because I’m unhappy. I write because it’s a way of fighting unhappiness.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

8. “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.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

9. “If you are killed because you are a writer, that’s the maximum expression of respect, you know.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

10. “Its easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

11. “Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

12. “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...”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

13. “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

14. “Violence represents the worst kind of conformism.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

15. “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.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

16. “Once upon a time, there was a boy who learned to read at the age of 5. This changed his life. Owing to the adventure tales he read, he discovered a way to escape from the poor house, the poor country, and the poor reality in which he lived.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

Featured in: Country Quotes

17. “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

18. “When I was young, when I started to write, we were totally convinced that literature was a kind of weapon.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

19. “I don’t accept the idea that literature can be just entertainment and that there is no consequences of literature in the real world.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

20. “Liberty is inseparable from social justice, and those who dissociate them, sacrificing the first with the purpose of attaining the second more quickly, are the true barbarians of our time.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

21. “Journalism is a way of voicing opinion, of participating in the political, social, or cultural debate.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

22. “Because in the civilization of the spectacle, intellectuals are of interest only if they play the fashion game and become clowns.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

23. “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.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

24. “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

25. “A good novel is a conjunction of many factors, the main of which is without a doubt, hard work.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

26. “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.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

Featured in: Reading Quotes

27. “One can’t fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

Featured in: Romance Quotes

28. “I convinced her that her first loyalty isn’t to other people, but to her own feelings.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

29. “Prosperity or egalitarianism – you have to choose. I favor freedom – you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

30. “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

31. “Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

32. “Death isn’t enough. It doesn’t remove the stain. But a slap, a whiplash, square on the face, does. Because a man’s face is as sacred as his mother or his wife.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

33. “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.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

34. “Ni en la guerra debe haber muertos inutiles. Usted me entiende, vaya al colegio y trate en el futuro de que la muerte del cadete Arana sirve para algo.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

35. “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.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

36. “No democracy is born perfect, and none ever gets to be perfect. Yet democracy is superior to authoritarian and totalitarian regimes because, unlike them, democracy is perfectible.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

37. “Les insultes d’une femme sont des fleurs pour un homme.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

38. “The essential difference between the culture of the past and the entertainment of today is that the products of the former sought to transcend mere present time, to endure, to stay alive for future generations, while the products of the latter are made to be consumed instantly and disappear, like cake or popcorn.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

39. “No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

40. “I was very young and lived with my grandparents in a villa with white walls in the Calle Ocharan, in Miraflores.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

41. “It’s easier to imagine the death of one person than those of a hundred or a thousand. When multiplied, suffering becomes abstract. It’s not easy to be moved by abstract things.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

42. “Es verdad que es imposible conocer a fondo a las personas, todas son insondables.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

43. “They had forgotten the abuses, the murders, the corruption, the spying, the isolation, the fear: horror had become myth. Everybody had jobs and there wasn’t so much crime.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

44. “We must mistrust utopias: they usually end in holocausts.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

45. “It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

46. “Nostalgia is cowardice.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

47. “And yet, my dear Estela, in the end one accepts the will of God, resigns oneself, and discovers that, even with all its calvaries, life is full of beautiful things.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

48. “Eroticism has its own moral justification because it says that pleasure is enough for me; it is a statement of the individual’s sovereignty.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

49. “It’s beautiful, as long as you concentrate on the landscape and the birds, because everything man-made there is ugly.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

50. “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.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa