213 Quotes by Mario Vargas Llosa

Prosperity or egalitarianism – you have to choose. I favor freedom – you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Since it is impossible to know what’s really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream and take refuge in illusion. Because of these strange circumstances, Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary.

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.

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