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
The worst thing that can happen to an artist is to be subsidized by the state. It leads to an intellectual and artistic castration.
There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.
A good novel is a conjunction of many factors, the main of which is without a doubt, hard work.
One can't fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser.
It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.
No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.
Its easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it
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.
Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.
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.
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...
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.
Eroticism has its own moral justification because it says that pleasure is enough for me; it is a statement of the individual's sovereignty.
Revolution will free society of its afflictions, while science will free the individual of his.