Mario Vargas Llosa Quotations

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.

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.

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

North American society could not have reached its state of high development and modernity had it not been an open society.

I write because I'm unhappy. I write because it's a way of fighting unhappiness.

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

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.

I 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.

I completely believe that - literature for me is a way of life. That's probably true of all writers or all artists. I think in the end this kind of activity absorbs one in such a way that it becomes one's way of life.

I think in a country like mine, violence is at the root of all human relations.