213 Quotes by Mario Vargas Llosa

But remember, the first thing you learn in the army is to be a man. And what do men do? They smoke, they drink, they gamble, they fuck. The cadets all know they get expelled of they're discovered. IF, Gamboa. We've already expelled quite a few. But the smart ones don't get caught. If they're going to be men, they have to take chances, they have to use their wits. That's the way the army is. Discipline isn't enough. You've got to have guts, and you've also got to have brains.

Ni siquiera tenía ánimos para concentrarse en la lectura.

Había sentido un dedicado malestar, una quieta nostalgia. ¿El amor, Zavalita? Entonces nunca habías estado enamorado de Aída, piensa. ¿O el amor era ese gusano en las tripas que sentías años atrás? Piensa: entonces nunca de Ana, Zavalita.

Yo de Lily me enamoré como un becerro, la forma más romántica de enamorarse —se decía también templarse al cien—...

But it (serial television) doesn’t remain in the mind. It doesn’t produce positive effects in political terms, in ideological terms. My impression is that this extraordinary digital revolution is producing also an extraordinary confusion.

I am somewhat allergic to explanations that divide men and women into frozen categories and attribute to each sex its characteristic virtues and shortcomings.

A person who does not read, or reads little, or reads only trash, is a person with an impediment: he can speak much but he will say little, because his vocabulary is deficient in the means for self-expression. This is not only a verbal limitation. It represents also a limitation in intellect and imagination. It is a poverty of thought, for the simple reason that ideas, the concepts through which we grasp the secrets of our condition, do not exist apart from words.

I was very young and lived with my grandparents in a villa with white walls in the Calle Ocharan, in Miraflores.

La literatura quizá hace a los seres humanos más aptos para la infelicidad, porque despierta unos apetitos y deseos que no pueden cumplirse, pero enriquece la sensibilidad de las personas y las da una comprensión mayor del mundo. Los hace…sentir mucho más aptos para la libertad.