Mario Vargas Llosa Quotes

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...

One can't fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser.

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

Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.

Life is a shitstorm, in which art is our only umbrella." (spoken by character in a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa)

Its easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it

I convinced her that her first loyalty isn't to other people, but to her own feelings.

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

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.

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.

Sentía una inmensa ternura por ella. Estaba seguro de que la querría siempre, para mi dicha y también mi desdicha.

Well, at heart I knew she'd never be a normal woman. And I didn't want her to be one, because what I loved in her were the indomitable and unpredictable aspects of her personality

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

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.

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.

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

Es más fácil imaginar la muerte de una persona que la de cien o mil...Multiplicado, el sufrimiento se vuelve abstracto. No es fácil conmoverse por cosas abstractas.

La literatura quizá hace a los seres humanos más aptos para la infelicidad, porque despierta unos apetitos y deseos que no pueden cumplirse, pero enriquece la sensibilidad de las personas y las da una comprensión mayor del mundo. Los hace…sentir mucho más aptos para la libertad.

No me preguntes por qué, porque ni muerta te lo voy a decir. Nunca te voy a decir que te quiero aunque te quiera.

Las mentiras machacadas día y noche se vuelven verdades.

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

Cuando creí que iba a perder la razón ante tanto sufrimiento. Así descubrí que un ser humano no puede vivir sin creer.

Hay días en que la recuerdo y me pregunto: ¿Qué estará haciendo? Hay noches en que la extraño y me pregunto: ¿Qué me estoy haciendo?

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.

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

La verdad, había en ella algo que era imposible no admirar, por esas razones que nos llevan a apreciar las obras bien hechas, aunque sean perversas.

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.

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.

هكذا هي السياسة ،إنها شق الطريق بين الجثث

Aunque dicen que sólo los imbéciles son felices, confieso que me sentía feliz.

Leer es protestar contra las insuficiencias de la vida

writing fiction is the best thing there is because absolutely everything is possible!

إن ما يفسّر البطولة خير تفسير ليست الدوافع السامية دائماً. هناك التحامل ، ضيق العقل و أشد ما يمكن تصوره من الأفكار غباءً.

O comes o te comen, no hay más remedio.

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.

...escribir lo que no se había vivido, lo que sólo se había querido vivir, era también una manera —cobarde y tímida— de vivirlo...

«Un libro abierto es un cerebro que habla; cerrado, un amigo que espera; olvidado, un alma que perdona; destruido, un corazón que llora».

Para todo el mundo es más difícil vivir en la verdad que en la mentira.

‎Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure...but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness.

Lo injusta que es a veces la suerte con los artistas que sueñan con encontrar el Paraíso en este terrenal valle de lágrimas.

I always write a draft version of the novel in which I try to develop, not the story, not the plot, but the possibilities of the plot. I write without thinking much, trying to overcome all kinds of self-criticism, without stopping, without giving any consideration to the style or structure of the novel, only putting down on paper everything that can be used as raw material, very crude material for later development in the story.

I am somewhat allergic to explanations that divide men and women into frozen categories and attribute to each sex its characteristic virtues and shortcomings.

Nostalgia is cowardice

El secreto de la felicidad, o, por lo menos, de la tranquilidad, es saber separar el sexo del amor. Y, si es posible, eliminar el amor romántico de tu vida, que es el que hace sufrir. Así se vive más tranquilo y se goza más, te aseguro.

Tú eres bonita sobre todo cuando sonríes.

Los zorros del desierto de Sechura aúllan como demonios cuando llega la noche; ¿sabes por qué?: para quebrar el silencio que los aterroriza.

It is as if Little Red Riding Hood had asked the wolf: "Dear Grandmother, what is the truth for?" And the wolf had replied: "The truth helps me tell you better lies.

Secretul fericirii, sau cel puțin al liniștii, e să știi să desparți sexul de iubire. Și, dacă e posibil, să elimini iubirea romantică din viața ta, căci ea te face să suferi.

We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.

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.

A person who does not read, or reads little, or reads only trash, is a person with an impediment: he can speak much but he will say little, because his vocabulary is deficient in the means for self-expression. This is not only a verbal limitation. It represents also a limitation in intellect and imagination. It is a poverty of thought, for the simple reason that ideas, the concepts through which we grasp the secrets of our condition, do not exist apart from words.

Pueden ustedes reírse de mí, cuando les dé la espalda.

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

Suspiró, abrumado por los niveles de imbecilidad que padecía el mundo.

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.

«En lo que se refiere a Dios hay que creer, no razonar», decía Herbert. «Si razonas, Dios se esfuma como una bocanada de humo.»

انت اخبث شخص عرفته ايتها الطفلة الخبيثة. انك مسخ من الانانية وانعدام الحس. قادرة علي ان تطعني بكل برودة افضل من يحسنون معاملتك.

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

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

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.

Yo no quería creer que hubiera traicionado a su compañero de toda la vida. Bueno, la política es eso, abrirse camino entre cadáveres.

Cheap, sentimental things

He was a man in the prime of his life, his fifties...broad forehead, aquiline nose, penetrating gaze, the very soul of rectitude and goodness.

زمین از اینکه ناچار است یکسر همان چیزها را بر گرده خودش ببیند خسته شده است و یک روز فریادش درمی‌آید که می‌خواهد کمی هم آرام بگیرد.

لە شەوێکی دڵگیر هیچ شتێک زۆرتر لە خوێندنی کتێبێکی باش مرۆڤ هێور ناکاتەوە، نە سەیرکردنی فیلم و نە گوێگرتن لە مۆسیقا. بخەوی و بخوێنی و بێخەیاڵی عالەم و ئادەم و دنیا بیت.

Podía soportar la soledad y las humillaciones que conocía desde niño y sólo herían su espíritu: lo horrible era el encierro, esa gran soledad exterior que no elegía, que alguien le arrojaba encima como una camisa de fuerza.

Era un refugio huir allí: la vida espléndida de la ficción daba fuerzas para soportar la vida verdadera. Pero la riqueza de la literatura hacía también que la realidad real se empobreciera.

Why would anyone who is deeply satisfied with reality, with real life as it is lived, dedicate himself to something as insubstantial and fanciful as the creation of fictional realities? Naturally, those who rebel against lie as it is, using their ability to invent different lives and different people, may do so for any number of reasons, honorable or dishonorable, generous or selfish, complex or banal. The nature of this basic questioning of reality, which to my mind lies at the heart of every literary calling, doesn't matter at all. What matters is that the rejection be strong enough to fuel the enthusiasm for a task as quixotic as tilting at windmills – the slight-of-hand replacement of the concrete, objective world of life as it is lived with the subtle and ephemeral world of fiction.

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...

L’ispirazione non esiste. È forse qualcosa che guida le mani di scultori e pittori e detta immagini e note all’udito di poeti e musicisti, ma che non va mai a trovare il romanziere: quest’ultimo è del tutto trascurato dalle muse ed è condannato a sostituire quella collaborazione negatagli con la testardaggine, la fatica e la pazienza

Qué suerte tenían aquellos para quienes la existencia del ser supremo no había sido nunca un problema, sino una certeza gracias a la cual el mundo se les ordenaba y todo encontraba su explicación y razón de ser.

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.

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?

Trujillo podía hacer que el agua se volviera vino y los panes se multiplicaran, si le daba en los cojones

Living is worth the effort if only because without life we could not read or imagine stories.

Because of literature we can decipher, at least partially, the hieroglyphic that existence tends to be for the great majority of human beings.

Aquí cambian las personas, teniente, nunca las cosas.

Ni siquiera tenía ánimos para concentrarse en la lectura.

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

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

Pero no olvide tampoco que lo primero que se aprende en el Ejército es a ser hombres. Los hombres fuman, se emborrachan, tiran contra, culean. Los cadetes saben que, si son descubiertos, se les expulsa. Ya han salido varios. Para hacerse hombre hay que correr riesgo, hay que ser audaz. Eso es el Ejército, Gamboa, no sólo la disciplina.

Scrivere un romanzo è una cerimonia che somiglia allo streap-tease. Come la ragazza che, sotto impudichi riflettori, si libera dei propri indumenti e mostra, a uno a uno, i suoi incanti segreti, così anche il romanziere mette a nudo la propria intimità in pubblico attraverso i suoi romanzi.

In this country, in one way or another, everyone had bean, was, or would be part of the regime. "The worst thing that can happen to a Dominican is to be intelligent or competent," he had once heard Agustín Cabral say ...and the words had been etched in his mind: "Because sooner or later Trujillo will call upon him to serve the regime, or his person, and when he calls, one is not permitted to say no." [Agustín Cabral] was proof of this truth....As Estrella Sadhalá always said, the Goat had taken from people the sacred attribute given to them by God: their free will.

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.

The sort of decision arrived at by saints and madmen is not revealed to others. It is forged little by little, in the folds of the spirit, tangential to reason, shielded from indiscreet eyes, not seeking the approval of others—who would never grant it—until it is at last put into practice. I imagine that in the process—the conceiving of a project and its ripening into action—the saint, the visionary, or the madman isolates himself more and more, walling himself up in solitude, safe from the intrusion of others.

My impression is that life—a big word, I know—inflicts themes on a writer through certain experiences that impress themselves on his consciousness or subconscious and later compel him to shake himself free by turning them into stories.

Un estómago que evacua puntual y totalmente es gemelo de una mente clara y de un alma bien pensada

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.

todo socialismo, al poner en marcha la planificación económica, al acabar con la competencia y la propiedad privada, establece automáticamente un mecanismo que a la corta o a la larga liquida el pluralismo político y las libertades, lo quieran o no los planificadores.

It is the case that, albeit to a lesser extent, all fictions make their readers live "the impossible", taking them out of themselves, breaking down barriers, and making them share, by identifying with the characters of the illusion, a life that is richer, more intense, or more abject and violent, or simply different from the one that they are confined to by the high-security prison that is real life. Fictions exist because of this fact. Because we have only one life, and our desires and fantasies demand a thousand lives. Because the abyss between what we are and what we would like to be has to be bridged somehow. That was why fictions were born: so that, through living this vicarious, transient, precarious, but also passionate and fascinating life that fiction transports us to, we can incorporate the impossible into the possible and our existence can be both reality and unreality, history and fable, concrete life and marvellous adventure.

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.

O conhecimento tem a ver com a evolução da técnica e das ciências, e a cultura é algo anterior ao conhecimento, uma propensão do espírito, uma sensibilidade e um cultivo da forma que dá sentido e orientação aos conhecimentos.

Escribo. Escribo que escribo. Mentalmente me veo escribir que escribo y también puedo verme ver que escribo. Me recuerdo escribiendo ya y también viéndome que escribía. Y me veo recordando que me veo escribir y me recuerdo viéndome recordar que escribía y escribo viéndome escribir que recuerdo haberme visto escribir que me veía escribir que recordaba haberme visto escribir que escribía y que escribía que escribo que escribía. También puedo imaginarme escribiendo que ya había escrito que me imaginaría escribiendo que había escrito que me imaginaba escribiendo que me veo escribir que escribo.

The search for liberty is simply part of the greater search for a world where respect for the rule of law and human rights is universal—a world free of dictators, terrorists, warmongers and fanatics, where men and women of all nationalities, races, traditions and creeds can coexist in the culture of freedom, where borders give way to bridges that people cross to reach their goals limited only by free will and respect for one another's rights. It is a search to which I've dedicated my writing, and so many have taken notice. But is it not a search to which we should all devote our very lives? The answer is clear when we see what is at stake

Fictions exist because of this fact. Because we have only one life, and our desires and fantasies demand a thousand lives. Because the abyss between what we are and what we would like to be has to be bridged somehow. That was why fictions were born: so that, through living this vicarious, transient, precarious, but also passionate and fascinating life that fiction transports us to, we can incorporate the impossible into the possible and our existence can be both reality and unreality, history and fable, concrete life and marvellous adventure.

He undressed and, wearing slippers and a robe, went to the bathroom to shave. He turned on the radio. They read the newspapers on the Dominican Voice and Caribbean Radio. Until a few years ago the news bulletins had begun at five. But when his brother Petan, the owner of the Dominican Voice, found out that he woke at four, he moved the newscasts up an hour. The other stations followed suit. They knew he listened to the radio while he shaved, bathed, and dressed, and they were painstakingly careful.

No lo entiendes, Urania. Hay muchas cosas de la Era que has llegado a entender; algunas, al principio, te parecían inextricables, pero, a fuerza de leer, escuchar, cotejar y pensar, has llegado a comprender que tantos millones de personas, machacadas por la propaganda, por la falta de información, embrutecidas por el adoctrinamiento, el aislamiento, despojadas de libre albedrío, de voluntad y hasta de curiosidad por el miedo y la práctica del servilismo y la obsecuencia, llegaran a divinizar a Trujillo. No solo a temerlo, sino a quererlo, como llegan a querer los hijos a los padres autoritarios, a convencerse de que azotes y castigos son por su bien.

At times I wondered whether writing was not a solipsistic luxury in countries like mine, where there were scant readers, so many people who were poor and illiterate, so much injustice, and where culture was a privilege of the few. These doubts, however, never stifled my calling, and I always kept writing even during those periods when earning a living absorbed most of my time. I believe I did the right thing, since if, for literature to flourish, it was first necessary for a society to achieve high culture, freedom, prosperity, and justice, it never would have existed. But thanks to literature, to the consciousness it shapes, the desires and longings it inspires, and our disenchantment with reality when we return from the journey to a beautiful fantasy, civilization is now less cruel than when storytellers began to humanize life with their fables. 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.

[Immigrants] who come from anywhere there is hunger, unemployment, oppression, and violence and who clandestinely cross the borders of countries that are prosperous, peaceful, and rich in opportunity, are certainly breaking the law, but they are exercising a natural and moral right which no legal norm or regulation should try to eliminate: the right to life, to survival, to escape the infernal existence they are condemned to by barbarous regimes entrenched on half the earth's surface. If ethical considerations had any pervasive effect at all, the women and men who brave the Straits of Gibraltar or the Florida Keys or the electric fences of Tijuana or the docks of Marseilles in search of work, freedom, and a future should be received with open arms.

La sua cecità intellettuale non gli permetteva di capire che questi fratelli, con istinto sicuro, hanno orientato la loro rivolta verso il nemico primo della libertà: il potere. E qual è il potere che li opprime, che nega loro il diritto alla terra, alla cultura, all'uguaglianza? Non è forse la Repubblica? E se sono armati per combatterla ciò significa che hanno indovinato anche il metodo, l'unico che posseggono gli sfruttati per spezzare le loro catene: la forza.