One can’t fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser.
We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.
Living is worth the effort if only because without life we could not read or imagine stories.
Because of literature we can decipher, at least partially, the hieroglyphic that existence tends to be for the great majority of human beings.
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.” Mario Vargas Llosa
One of the most damaging myths of our time is that poor countries live in poverty because of a conspiracy of the rich countries, who arrange things so as to keep them underdeveloped, in order to exploit them.
Honor, vengeance, that rigorous religion, those punctilicious codes of conduct – how to explain their existence here, at the end of the world, among people who possessed nothing but the rags and the lice they had on them?
Instead of speaking of justice and injustice, freedom and oppression, classless society and class society, they talked in terms of God and the Devil.
If you are killed because you are a writer, that’s the maximum expression of respect, you know.
Prosperity or egalitarianism – you have to choose. I favor freedom – you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.