I don't accept the idea that literature can be just entertainment and that there is no consequences of literature in the real world.
Mario Vargas LlosaIf you are killed because you are a writer, that's the maximum expression of respect, you know.
Mario Vargas LlosaBut what do I have? The things I'm told and the things I tell, that's all. And as far as I know, that never yet made anyone fly.
Mario Vargas LlosaNorth American society could not have reached its state of high development and modernity had it not been an open society.
Mario Vargas LlosaThis fact was something I also learned from this first novel that I needed personal experience to invent, to fantasize, to create fiction, but at the same time I needed some distance, some perspective on this experience in order to feel free enough to manipulate it and to transform it into fiction. If the experience is very close, I feel inhibited. I have never been able to write fiction about something that has happened to me recently. If the closeness of the real reality, of living reality, is to have a persuasive effect on my imagination, I need a distance, a distance in time and in space.
Mario Vargas Llosa