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
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.
Prosperity or egalitarianism -- you have to choose. I favor freedom -- you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.
I don't accept the idea that literature can be just entertainment and that there is no consequences of literature in the real world.
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.
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.
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.
Prosperity or egalitarianism - you have to choose. I favor freedom - you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.
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.
North American society could not have reached its state of high development and modernity had it not been an open society.
I write because I'm unhappy. I write because it's a way of fighting unhappiness.
Journalism is a way of voicing opinion, of participating in the political, social, or cultural debate.
Even though what I enjoy most is literature, I would not want to live only in a world of fiction, cut off from the rest of life. No - I want to always have a foot in the street, to be inmersed in the activities of my contemporaries, in the times, in the place where I live.
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.
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.