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 LlosaRead
In my case, literature is a kind of revenge. It's something that gives me what real life can't give me - all the adventures, all the suffering. All the experiences I can only live in the imagination, literature completes.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Literature offers an escape from reality, providing experiences unattainable in real life.
In this quote, Mario Vargas Llosa expresses how literature serves as a source of fulfillment and adventure that reality often cannot provide. It highlights the power of storytelling and the imagination, suggesting that through literature, one can vicariously experience a wide range of human emotions and situations that they may not encounter in their everyday life.
Themes
LiteratureImaginationAdventureExperiencesLife
In practice
Example use cases
During a book club discussion, I might share this quote to highlight the importance of literature in enriching our lives.
More from Mario Vargas Llosa
All quotes →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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Mario Vargas LlosaRead
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.
Mario Vargas LlosaRead
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