In my case, literature is a kind of revenge. It's something that gives me what real life can't give me - all the adventures, all the suffering. All the experiences I can only live in the imagination, literature completes.
Mario Vargas LlosaRead
I was absolutely convinced that I wouldn't win the Nobel Prize. My impression was that the Nobel Prize in Literature was given to people more or less affiliated with, let's say, socialist ideas, and that was not my case.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects the author's skepticism about deserving recognition due to perceived ideological biases.
Mario Vargas Llosa expresses his doubts regarding the Nobel Prize in Literature, believing it typically favors authors with socialist leanings, which he does not identify with. His statement highlights the complexities of literary recognition and the perceived biases that can influence award outcomes.
Themes
Nobel PrizeLiteratureRecognitionBiasSocialism
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about literary awards and their potential biases, this quote can be used to illustrate an author's perspective.
More from Mario Vargas Llosa
All quotes →I think if you're impregnated with good literature, with good culture, you're much more difficult to manipulate, and you're much more aware of the dangers that powers represent.
Mario Vargas LlosaRead
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.
Mario Vargas LlosaRead
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.
Mario Vargas LlosaRead
Today, everybody is more or less conscious of the total failure of the Cuban revolution to produce wealth, to produce a better standard of living for the Cubans. With the exception of small radical parties, Latin Americans know that it's a brutal dictatorship and the longest in Latin American history.
Mario Vargas LlosaRead
When I was growing up, the Spanish-speaking world was Balkanized. We were isolated. We didn't know what was happening in cultural terms in Ecuador, Colombia and Chile. Nowadays, this has changed a lot - fortunately for writers and readers. There is much more integration.
Mario Vargas LlosaRead
Similar quotes
Death focuses the mind on the things that really matter: why are we here, and what should we do?
Arthur C. ClarkeRead
The doctrine of foods is of great ethical and political significance. Food becomes blood, blood becomes heart and brain, thoughts and mind stuff. Human fare is the foundation of human culture and thought. Would you improve a nation? Give it, instead of declamations against sin, better food. Man is what he eats [Der Mensch ist, was er isst].
Ludwig FeuerbachRead
In our patriarchal world, we are all taught - whether we like to think we are or not - that God, being male, values maleness much more than he values femaleness... that in order to propitiate God, women must propitiate men.
Sonia JohnsonRead
I feel that my environment reflects my belief in the grace and art and elegance of living simply.
Bell HooksRead
We always plan too much and always think too little.
Joseph A. SchumpeterRead
I consider Christianity to be one of the great disasters of the human race... It would be impossible to imagine anything more un - Christianlike than theology.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead