Mariette

“If in this address I were to summon all the writers to whom I owe a few things or a great deal, their shadows would plunge us into darkness. They are innumerable. In addition to revealing the secrets of the storytelling craft, they obliged me to explore the bottomless depths of humanity, admire its heroic deeds and feel horror at its savagery.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, In Praise of Reading and Fiction: The Nobel Lecture

“Fictions exist because of this fact. Because we have only one life, and our desires and fantasies demand a thousand lives. Because the abyss between what we are and what we would like to be has to be bridged somehow. That was why fictions were born: so that, through living this vicarious, transient, precarious, but also passionate and fascinating life that fiction transports us to, we can incorporate the impossible into the possible and our existence can be both reality and unreality, history and fable, concrete life and marvellous adventure.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Misérables

“I discovered that the predisposition for languages is as mysterious as the inclination of certain people for mathematics or music and has nothing to do with intelligence or knowledge. It is something separate, a gift that some possess and others don’t.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, The Bad Girl

“And what do I do?” replied Turk. “What do thirty or forty percent of Dominicans do? Aren’t we all working for the government or its businesses? Only the very rich can allow themselves the luxury of not working for Trujillo.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, The Feast of the Goat