"Revolution will free society of its afflictions, while science will free the individual of his."
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Quote collection
Mario Vargas Llosa quotes (page 2 of 4)
65 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity."
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"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."
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"Eroticism has its own moral justification because it says that pleasure is enough for me; it is a statement of the individual's sovereignty."
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"Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections."
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"Violence represents the worst kind of conformism."
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"A good novel is a conjunction of many factors, the main of which is without a doubt, hard work."
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"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."
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"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."
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"The worst thing that can happen to an artist is to be subsidized by the state. It leads to an intellectual and artistic castration."
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"But what do I have? The things I'm told and the things I tell, that's all. And as far as I know, that never yet made anyone fly."
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"We must mistrust utopias: they usually end in holocausts."
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"Do the rhetorical quarrels of bourgeois political parties have anything to do with the interests of the humble and downtrodden?"
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"It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around."
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"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."
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"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."
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"If you are killed because you are a writer, that's the maximum expression of respect, you know."
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"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."
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"That is one thing I am sure of amid my many uncertainties regarding the literary vocation: deep inside, a writer feels that writing is the best thing that ever happened to him, or could ever happen to him, because as far as he is concerned, writing is the best possible way of life, never mind the social, political, or financial rewards of what he might achieve through it."
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"Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories."
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