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
In general, I think my freedom of invention is not limited when I use historical characters.
There are so many new young poets, novelists, and playwrights who are much less politically committed than the former generations. The trend is to be totally concentrated on the literary aesthetic and to consider politics to be something dirty that shouldn't be mixed with an artistic or a literary vocation.
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 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.
The novels that have fascinated me most are the ones that have reached me less through the channels of the intellect or reason than bewitched me.
Good literature always ends up showing those who read it... the inevitable limitation of all power to fulfill human aspirations and desires.
Good literature is absolutely necessary for a society that wants to be free.
Only if I reach 100 years old will I write a very complete autobiography. Not before.
Part of the reasons I have lived the life I have is because I wanted to have an adventurous life. But my best adventures are more literary than political.
I remember, when I was young, to have a literary or artistic vocation was really dramatic because you were so isolated from the common world. You felt that you were marginal, and if you dared to try to organise your life around your vocation, you knew you'd be completely segregated.
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.
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.
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.
Journalism is a way of voicing opinion, of participating in the political, social, or cultural debate.
Reality is the richest thing there is, the most important thing there is. Our imagination allows us to live an artificial life that is wonderful, extremely rich, but I don't believe any artist would dare to say that artifice is better than real life.
Faulkner was the first novelist I read with pen and paper in hand because his technique stunned me.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 never get the feeling that I've decided rationally, cold-bloodedly to write a story. On the contrary, certain events or people, sometimes dreams or readings, impose themselves suddenly and demand attention.
When I was growing up, the Spanish-speaking world was Balkanized. We were isolated. We didn't know what was happening in cultural terms in Ecuador, Colombia and Chile. Nowadays, this has changed a lot - fortunately for writers and readers. There is much more integration.
Literature is dangerous: it awakens a rebellious attitude in us.
I love stories, and my life is principally concentrated on stories, but not with a pretense of scientific precision.
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.
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.
I think that literature has the important effect of creating free, independent, critical citizens who cannot be manipulated.
I am not going to participate in professional politics again.
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.
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.
Eroticism is born at a time in civilisation when sexual instinct becomes deanimalised and enriched with contributions from art and from literature. A world of theatricality emerges around the act of love.
I wouldn't reread Sartre today. Compared to everything I've read since, his fiction seems dated and has lost much of its value.
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 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.
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.
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.
I would like my novels to be read the way I read the novels I love.
A novel is something, while despair is nothing.
I remember how my world expanded in amazing fashion by that magical operation of translating words into images, and images into stories.
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.
In fiction, you are not limited by real facts. You can manipulate reality; you can invent without being disloyal to the essence of history.
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.
Iraq is better without Saddam Hussein than with Saddam Hussein. Without a doubt.
I learnt to read when I was five, and I think that is the most important thing that happened to me.
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.
Good novel is a conjunction of many factors, the main of which is, without a doubt, hard work. There are many things behind a good novel, but in particular, there is a lot of work - a lot of patience, a lot of stubbornness, and a critical spirit.
I think yellow journalism is something that appears everywhere, in the underdeveloped and developed worlds alike.
