MARIO VARGAS LLOSA

Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections.

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.

If you are killed because you are a writer, that's the maximum expression of respect, you know.

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

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.

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.

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

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.

... the perfect dictatorship.

Prosperity or egalitarianism—you have to choose. I favor freedom—you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.

A modern democracy cannot allow its citizens to be exonerated

You cannot be a modern man and be a Marxist.

Reading changed dreams into life and life into dreams.

Do the rhetorical quarrels of bourgeois political parties have anything to do with the interests of the humble and downtrodden?

I wouldn't reread Sartre today. Compared to everything I've read since, his fiction seems dated and has lost much of its value.

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.

I am not going to participate in professional politics again.

I remember, when I was young, to have a literary or artistic vocation was really dramatic because you were so isolated from the common world. You felt that you were marginal, and if you dared to try to organise your life around your vocation, you knew you'd be completely segregated.

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.

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.

In 1975, I went to the Dominican Republic for eight months during the shooting of a film based on my novel 'Captain Pantoja and the Special Service.' It was during this period I heard and read about Trujillo.

Literature is dangerous: it awakens a rebellious attitude in us.

I learnt to read when I was five, and I think that is the most important thing that happened to me.

The Nobel prize is a fairytale for a week and a nightmare for a year. You can't imagine the pressure to give interviews, to go to book fairs.