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
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.
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.
Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections.
Eroticism has its own moral justification because it says that pleasure is enough for me; it is a statement of the individual's sovereignty.
No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.
If you are killed because you are a writer, that's the maximum expression of respect, you know.
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.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
Prosperity or egalitarianism - you have to choose. I favor freedom - you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.
