Mario Vargas Llosa Quotes (1936-2025)

“Do the rhetorical quarrels of bourgeois political parties have anything to do with the interests of the humble and downtrodden?”

“Political correctness is the enemy of freedom because it rejects honesty and authenticity. We have to tackle it as the distortion of the truth.”

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

“Writing stories was not easy. When they were turned into words, projects withered on the paper and ideas and images failed. How to reanimate them? Fortunately, the masters were there, teachers to learn from and examples to follow. Flaubert taught me that talent is unyielding discipline and long patience. Faulkner, that form – writing and structure – elevates or impoverishes subjects. Martorell, Cervantes, Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, Conrad, Thomas Mann, that scope and ambition are as important in a novel as stylistic dexterity and narrative strategy.”

“Liberalism is above all an attitude toward life and society based on tolerance and respect, a love for culture, a desire to coexist with others and a firm defense of freedom as a supreme value. A freedom that is, at the same time, the driving force of material progress, of science, arts, and letters, and of a civilization that has produced sovereign individuals, with their independence, their rights, and their responsibilities that are always held in balance with those of other individuals, protected by a legal system that guarantees coexistence within diversity. Economic freedom is a key element of liberal doctrine but certainly not the only one.”

“But while he [Grosz] painted all this violence, we can see from his first drawings onward that he had an ambivalent attitude towards it: he rejected it, and at the same time was fascinated by it. In this respect, he has had some influence on what I do. Grosz's ambivalence is something that I have in myself.. .This is a great paradox of art and literature – what is despicable in life can be very attractive and appealing in art. You nourish yourself with everything that you hate.”

“The extraordinary political and intellectual feat of Solzhenitsyn was to emerge from the hell of concentration camp to tell the story... in books whose moral and documentary force has no parallel in modern history.”

“Burroughs doesn't interest me at all as a novelist; his experimental, psychedelic stories have always bored me, so much that I don't think I've ever been able to read one. But Junky, the first book he wrote, a factual and autobiographical account of how he became a drug addict and how his addiction to drugs -- free choice augmenting what was already doubtless a certain proclivity -- made him a willing slave, furnishes an accurate description of what I believe to be the literary vocation, of the utter interdependence of the writer and his work and the way the latter feeds on the former, on all he is and all he does or does not do.”

“Neruda adored life. He was wild about everything - painting, art in general, books, rare editions, food, drink. Eating and drinking were almost a mystical experience for him. A wonderfully likeable man, full of vitality-if you forget his poems in praise of Stalin, of course. He lived in a near-feudal world, where everything led to his rejoicing, his sweet-toothed exuberance for life. I had the good fortune to spend a weekend on Isla Negra. It was wonderful! A kind of social machinery worked around him: hordes of people who cooked and worked-and always quantities of guests. It was a very funny society, extraordinarily alive, without the slightest trace of intellectualism. Neruda was exactly the opposite of Borges, the man who appeared never to drink, smoke, or eat, who one would have said had never made love, for whom all these things seemed completely secondary, and if he had done them it was out of politeness and nothing more. That's because ideas, reading, reflection, and creation were his life, the purely cerebral life. Neruda comes out of the Jorge Amado and Rafael Alberti tradition that says literature is generated by a sensual experience of life.”

“I belong to the first generation of Latin American writers brought up reading other Latin American writers. Before my time the work of Latin American writers was not well distributed, even on our continent. In Chile it was very hard to read other writers from Latin America. My greatest influences have been all the great writers of the Latin American Boom in literature: García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Borges, Paz, Rulfo, Amado, etc.”