213 Quotes by Mario Vargas Llosa

The houses are ugly, imitations of imitations.

Ni en la guerra debe haber muertos inutiles. Usted me entiende, vaya al colegio y trate en el futuro de que la muerte del cadete Arana sirve para algo.

Es verdad que es imposible conocer a fondo a las personas, todas son insondables.

The naive idea that, through education, one can transmit culture to all of society is destroying ‘higher culture’, because the only way of achieving this universal democratization of culture is by impoverishing culture, making it ever more superficial.

Eroticism has its own moral justification because it says that pleasure is enough for me; it is a statement of the individual’s sovereignty.

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.

The symbol of a setting for a Hemingway story is a boxing ring; for Borges, a library. On the other hand I think Nabokov was a writer quite close to Borges. He had the same rich literary culture, moved with great ease in different languages and traditions, and had a playful approach to literature-literature as an intellectual game, through which, of course, the real truths could appear. But apparently the game was for Nabokov just an exercise devoid of moral substance.

Perhaps it was true that because of the disastrous governments that came afterward, many Dominicans missed Trujillo now. 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.

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.