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
Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections.
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.
I think yellow journalism is something that appears everywhere, in the underdeveloped and developed worlds alike.
Literature is dangerous: it awakens a rebellious attitude in us.
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.
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.
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.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
A novel is something, while despair is nothing.
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.
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.
There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.
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.
No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.
I wouldn't reread Sartre today. Compared to everything I've read since, his fiction seems dated and has lost much of its value.
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.
I am in favor of economic freedom, but I am not a conservative.
Good literature always ends up showing those who read it... the inevitable limitation of all power to fulfill human aspirations and desires.
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.
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.
I am not going to participate in professional politics again.
Only if I reach 100 years old will I write a very complete autobiography. Not before.
I love stories, and my life is principally concentrated on stories, but not with a pretense of scientific precision.
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.
I remember how my world expanded in amazing fashion by that magical operation of translating words into images, and images into stories.
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.
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.
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.
I learnt to read when I was five, and I think that is the most important thing that happened to me.
Journalism is a way of voicing opinion, of participating in the political, social, or cultural debate.
Faulkner was the first novelist I read with pen and paper in hand because his technique stunned me.
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.
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.
I think that literature has the important effect of creating free, independent, critical citizens who cannot be manipulated.
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.
In fiction, you are not limited by real facts. You can manipulate reality; you can invent without being disloyal to the essence of history.
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.
Iraq is better without Saddam Hussein than with Saddam Hussein. Without a doubt.
Prosperity or egalitarianism - you have to choose. I favor freedom - you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.
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.
If you are killed because you are a writer, that's the maximum expression of respect, you know.
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.
Good literature is absolutely necessary for a society that wants to be free.
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.
I would like my novels to be read the way I read the novels I love.
In general, I think my freedom of invention is not limited when I use historical characters.
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.
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.
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.
