Quotes by Mario Llosa

• No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.
• 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.
• 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.
• There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.
• Prosperity or egalitarianism - you have to choose. I favor freedom - you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.
• Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections.
• It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
• If you are killed because you are a writer, that's the maximum expression of respect, you know.
• Eroticism has its own moral justification because it says that pleasure is enough for me; it is a statement of the individual's sovereignty.
• 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.