Top 90 Mario Vargas Llosa Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Journalism has been very important for me – for a long time I made my living as a journalist, and it also serves as a source of ideas. Many of the things I have written I would not have written without the experience of being a journalist.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

52. “Do the rhetorical quarrels of bourgeois political parties have anything to do with the interests of the humble and downtrodden?”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

53. “I think in a country like mine, violence is at the root of all human relations.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

54. “Revolution will free society of its afflictions, while science will free the individual of his.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

55. “This definition was not just limited to establishing a method for exploring the specificity of one human group in relation to another. It also desired, from the outset, to renounce the prejudiced and racist ethnography about which the West has never tired of berating itself. The intention could not have been loftier, but the well-known saying tells us that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Because.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

56. “There were so many problems; the hydra had so many heads, iniquity raised its head everywhere one looked.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

57. “Instead of speaking of justice and injustice, freedom and oppression, classless society and class society, they talked in terms of God and the Devil.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

58. “The naive idea that, through education, one can transmit culture to all of society is destroying ‘higher culture’, because the only way of achieving this universal democratization of culture is by impoverishing culture, making it ever more superficial.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

59. “The symbol of a setting for a Hemingway story is a boxing ring; for Borges, a library. On the other hand I think Nabokov was a writer quite close to Borges. He had the same rich literary culture, moved with great ease in different languages and traditions, and had a playful approach to literature-literature as an intellectual game, through which, of course, the real truths could appear. But apparently the game was for Nabokov just an exercise devoid of moral substance.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

60. “I discovered that the predisposition for languages is as mysterious as the inclination of certain people for mathematics or music and has nothing to do with intelligence or knowledge. It is something separate, a gift that some possess and others don’t.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

61. “That is one thing I am sure of amid my many uncertainties regarding the literary vocation: deep inside, a writer feels that writing is the best thing that ever happened to him, or could ever happen to him, because as far as he is concerned, writing is the best possible way of life, never mind the social, political, or financial rewards of what he might achieve through it.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

62. “North American society could not have reached its state of high development and modernity had it not been an open society.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

63. “Perhaps it was true that because of the disastrous governments that came afterward, many Dominicans missed Trujillo now. 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

64. “It isn’t true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

65. “One of the most damaging myths of our time is that poor countries live in poverty because of a conspiracy of the rich countries, who arrange things so as to keep them underdeveloped, in order to exploit them.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

66. “In general, I think my freedom of invention is not limited when I use historical characters.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

67. “A writer is not always conscious of the influences he has received.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

68. “Honor, vengeance, that rigorous religion, those punctilicious codes of conduct – how to explain their existence here, at the end of the world, among people who possessed nothing but the rags and the lice they had on them?”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

69. “The disappearance of any minimal consensus about aesthetic value means that in this field confusion reigns and will continue to reign for a long time, since it is now not possible to discern with any degree of objectivity what it is to have talent or to lack talent, what is beautiful and what is ugly, what work represents something new and durable and what is just a will-o’-the-wisp.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

70. “Their curses were not aimed at any definite target: they swore at such abstractions as God, the Officers, the Mothers of Others, with more music than meaning.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

71. “Probably there are no longer any societies in which the best people are attracted to civic duties.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

72. “Writing is a compensatory activity, and literature abounds in cases like his. Borges’s pages teem with knives, crimes, and scenes of torture, but the cruelty is kept at a distance by his fine sense of irony and by the cool rationalism of his prose, which never falls into sensationalism or the purely emotional. This lends a statuesque quality to the physical horror, giving it the nature of a work of art set in an unreal world.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

73. “The writer’s job is to write with rigor, with commitment, to defend what they believe with all the talent they have. I think that’s part of the moral obligation of a writer, which cannot be only purely artistic. I think a writer has some kind of responsibility at least to participate in the civic debate. I think literature is impoverished, if it becomes cut from the main agenda of people, of society, of life.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

74. “There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

75. “A novel which persuades us of its truth is true however full of lies it may be.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

76. “De fiecare data, imi aparea tot mai clar ca unicul lucru pe care doream sa-l fac in viata era sa devin scriitor si astfel mi se intarea convingerea ca singura cale pentru a reusi este aceea de a te darui, trup si suflet, numai literaturii.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

77. “Borges’s ethnocentric limitation does not detract from his many other admirable qualities, but it is best not to sidestep it when giving a comprehensive appraisal of his work. Certainly, it is a limitation that offers further proof of his humanity because, as has been said over and over again, there is no such thing as absolute perfection in this world, not even in the world of a creative artist like Borges, who comes as close as anyone to achieving it.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

78. “The houses are ugly, imitations of imitations.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

79. “Light literature, along with light cinema and light art, give the reader and the viewer the comfortable impression that they are cultured, revolutionary, modern and in the vanguard without having to make the slightest intellectual effort. Culture that purports to be avant-garde and iconoclastic instead offers conformity in its worst forms: smugness and self-satisfaction.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

80. “I have been always fascinated and seduced by history, which I think is very close, very close to literature.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

81. “Lily la chilenita, la camarada Arlette, madame Robert Arnoux, Mrs. Richardson, Kuriko y madame Ricardo Somocurcio, se llamaba, en realidad, Otilia. Otilita.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

82. “I know what a man feels close to the woman he loves, but he’s affraid to do anything.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

83. “A Criminal is the case of surplus of human energy directed in the wrong direction.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

84. “The worst thing that can happen to an artist is to be subsidized by the state. It leads to an intellectual and artistic castration.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

85. “Whether religious or racial, anti-Semitism is always repugnant, one of the most destructive manifestations of human stupidity and evil. What is profoundly expressed in it is man’s traditional mistrust of the man who is not part of his tribe, that ‘other’ who speaks a different language, whose skin is a different color, and who participates in mysterious rites and rituals.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

86. “When you start looking for purity in politics, you eventually get to unreality.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

87. “Because happiness was temporal, individual, in exceptional circumstances twofold, on extremely rare occasions tripartite, and never collective, civic.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

88. “The genius of the Spanish writer has always flourished through excessive rhetoric, which expresses a fundamental element in our nature and in our culture. If you think of our great writers, all of them are great rhetoricians. Think of Pablo Neruda, for instance, a great poet. It is the exuberance, the excess. Creation is something that appears like a natural phenomena, a kind of transpiration of nature more than an intellectual exercise.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

89. “One of the reasons why literature is important is that it gives us an instrument with which to understand time. In real life time is something that devours us, is something that does not give us the necessary perspective to understand how this time in which we are immersed flows; and so we do not have perspective, we do not have the necessary distance to understand really what is happening. Therefore, we need artificial order for understanding time.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

90. “We do so many things together. We go to theatres, exhibitions, bookstores, we spend hours and hours discussing politics, books, films, friends. And you think I do these things for the same reason you do, because I enjoy them. But you’re wrong. I do them all for it, for the tapeworm. That’s how it seems to me: that my whole life is no longer for my sake but for the sake of what I carry inside me, of which I am now no more than a servant.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

91. “The real truth is one thing, and the literary truth is another; and there is nothing more difficult than to want both truths to coincide.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

92. “The simple fact is that he didn’t write what he saw but what he felt and believed, what those all around him felt and believed. That’s how that whole tangled web of false stories and humbug got woven, becoming so intricate that there is now no way to disentangle it.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

93. “In matters concerning God, you have to believe, not reason,” Herbert would say. “If you reason, God vanishes like a mouthful of smoke.” Roger.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

94. “Reality and fantasy are fused through the style and through the ease with which the narrator moves from one to the other, more often than not displaying devastatingly sardonic erudition and an underlying skepticism that keeps in check any undue indulgence.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

95. “If in this address I were to summon all the writers to whom I owe a few things or a great deal, their shadows would plunge us into darkness. They are innumerable. In addition to revealing the secrets of the storytelling craft, they obliged me to explore the bottomless depths of humanity, admire its heroic deeds and feel horror at its savagery.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

96. “And what do I do?” replied Turk. “What do thirty or forty percent of Dominicans do? Aren’t we all working for the government or its businesses? Only the very rich can allow themselves the luxury of not working for Trujillo.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa