What is essential in love is what the French call 'amour fou.' What is that in English? Crazy love? That doesn't sound as beautiful. It's a total kind of love that not only embraces feelings, actions, but a kind of understanding of the world from the perspective of love.

Mario Vargas Llosa

To write is a relief from life's problems. It is a way in which you revenge yourself. In art, the writer achieves utopia. But any attempt to achieve social utopia is bound to catastrophe. If you want a society of saints, the result is hell, repression, totalitarianism, and persecution.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Society Life Art

Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Take T Ship

My three years in politics was very instructive about the way in which the appetite for political power can destroy a human mind, destroy principles and values, and transform people into little monsters.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Power Politics Pet

I think yellow journalism is something that appears everywhere, in the underdeveloped and developed worlds alike.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Yellow Yell Worlds

Literature is dangerous: it awakens a rebellious attitude in us.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Attitude Anger Wake

I don't want to finish my life not being alive. I think that is the saddest thing that can happen to a person. I want to keep living to the end.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Sad Life Want

When I was at university in the Fifties, Latin America was full of dictators. Trujillo was the emblematic figure because, of course, of his cruelty, corruption, extravagance, and theatricalities.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Use Us Up

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.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Business Your You

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

Mario Vargas Llosa

UN True T

A novel is something, while despair is nothing.

Mario Vargas Llosa

While Thing Thin

Today, everybody is more or less conscious of the total failure of the Cuban revolution to produce wealth, to produce a better standard of living for the Cubans. With the exception of small radical parties, Latin Americans know that it's a brutal dictatorship and the longest in Latin American history.

Mario Vargas Llosa

History Failure Art

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.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Good Young You

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

Mario Vargas Llosa

T Political Pat

In 1975, I went to the Dominican Republic for eight months during the shooting of a film based on my novel 'Captain Pantoja and the Special Service.' It was during this period I heard and read about Trujillo.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Vice Tin T

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.

Mario Vargas Llosa

While Thing Thin

I wouldn't reread Sartre today. Compared to everything I've read since, his fiction seems dated and has lost much of its value.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Art Would Very

What is essential in love is what the French call 'amour fou.' What is that in English? Crazy love? That doesn't sound as beautiful. It's a total kind of love that not only embraces feelings, actions, but a kind of understanding of the world from the perspective of love.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Love World Understanding

I am in favor of economic freedom, but I am not a conservative.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Freedom T Reed

Good literature always ends up showing those who read it... the inevitable limitation of all power to fulfill human aspirations and desires.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Power Good Wing

I think if you're impregnated with good literature, with good culture, you're much more difficult to manipulate, and you're much more aware of the dangers that powers represent.

Mario Vargas Llosa

War Power Good

Sartre said that wars were acts and that, with literature, you could produce changes in history. Now, I don't think literature doesn't produce changes, but I think the social and political effect of literature is much less controllable than I thought.

Mario Vargas Llosa

I am not going to participate in professional politics again.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Only if I reach 100 years old will I write a very complete autobiography. Not before.

Mario Vargas Llosa

I love stories, and my life is principally concentrated on stories, but not with a pretense of scientific precision.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Everyone is in a rush in New York, even in restaurants and in cafes. You dont have the serenity. That, I think, is very important in order to read.

Mario Vargas Llosa

I remember how my world expanded in amazing fashion by that magical operation of translating words into images, and images into stories.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Each book, for me, has been an adventure, a period of time dedicated to study, to document certain facts, to traveling, and also to fantasize and to invent.

Mario Vargas Llosa

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.

Mario Vargas Llosa

I think everybody, or the great majority of human beings, have this aspiration to become other: to live a different identity, at least for a while.

Mario Vargas Llosa

I learnt to read when I was five, and I think that is the most important thing that happened to me.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Journalism is a way of voicing opinion, of participating in the political, social, or cultural debate.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Faulkner was the first novelist I read with pen and paper in hand because his technique stunned me.

Mario Vargas Llosa

I work very hard, you know, but I don't think that I'm working, because what I do pleases me so much. I write about certain things because certain things happen to me.

Mario Vargas Llosa

If you live in a country where there is nothing comparable to free information, often literature becomes the only way to be more or less informed about what's going on.

Mario Vargas Llosa

I think that literature has the important effect of creating free, independent, critical citizens who cannot be manipulated.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Couldn't imagine any other way of living, outside of books, outside my work. Which doesn't mean I am not interested in other things, of course - I am interested in many things. But the center, the crux, is always literature.

Mario Vargas Llosa

In fiction, you are not limited by real facts. You can manipulate reality; you can invent without being disloyal to the essence of history.

Mario Vargas Llosa

When I was young, I was a passionate reader of Sartre. I've read the American novelists, in particular the lost generation - Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos - especially Faulkner. Of the authors I read when I was young, he is one of the few who still means a lot to me.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Iraq is better without Saddam Hussein than with Saddam Hussein. Without a doubt.

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.

Mario Vargas Llosa

In general, a writer would like to think that the best book that he has written is the book that he is writing, and the next book will be even better. Maybe if this is not true, it is very useful to keep the illusion alive.

Mario Vargas Llosa

If you are killed because you are a writer, that's the maximum expression of respect, you know.

Mario Vargas Llosa

The Nobel prize is a fairytale for a week and a nightmare for a year. You can't imagine the pressure to give interviews, to go to book fairs.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Good literature is absolutely necessary for a society that wants to be free.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Latin America seemed to be a land where there were only dictators, revolutionaries, catastrophes. Now we know that Latin America can produce also artists, musicians, painters, thinkers, and novelists.

Mario Vargas Llosa

I would like my novels to be read the way I read the novels I love.

Mario Vargas Llosa

In general, I think my freedom of invention is not limited when I use historical characters.

Mario Vargas Llosa

I thought that, when I came to New York, that I would have a very life here for three months or three and a half months. And my impression is that it won't be so quiet as I wanted.

Mario Vargas Llosa

I think that literature is something that embraces a much larger experience than politics. It's an expression of what is life, of what are all the dimensions of life. But politics is one among others.

Mario Vargas Llosa

I was absolutely convinced that I wouldn't win the Nobel Prize. My impression was that the Nobel Prize in Literature was given to people more or less affiliated with, let's say, socialist ideas, and that was not my case.

Mario Vargas Llosa