Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquis of Vargas Llosa, more commonly known as Mario Vargas Llosa, is a Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, essayist, college professor, and recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading writers of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a larger international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. Upon...
NationalityPeruvian
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth28 March 1936
CountryPeru
I was very young and lived with my grandparents in a villa with white walls in the Calle Ocharan, in Miraflores.
Science is still only a candle glimmering in a great pitch-dark cavern.
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.
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.
Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections.
writing fiction is the best thing there is because absolutely everything is possible!
I don't accept the idea that literature can be just entertainment and that there is no consequences of literature in the real world.
When I was young, when I started to write, we were totally convinced that literature was a kind of weapon.
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.
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.
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.
Do the rhetorical quarrels of bourgeois political parties have anything to do with the interests of the humble and downtrodden?
We must mistrust utopias: they usually end in holocausts.
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.