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
Life is a shitstorm, in which art is our only umbrella." (spoken by character in a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa)
Interpretation
What this quote means
Art provides protection and solace amidst the chaos of life.
This quote suggests that life can often be turbulent and challenging, akin to a storm, characterized by difficulties and hardships. In such times, art serves as a vital refuge and a means of coping, allowing individuals to find beauty, meaning, and comfort even in the most chaotic experiences.
Themes
ArtLifeChaosUmbrellaComfort
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech on creativity, one might say, 'As Vargas Llosa reminds us, art is the umbrella we need in lifeβs shitstorms.'
More from Mario Vargas Llosa
All quotes βI 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.
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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.
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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.
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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
The writing life requires courage, patience, persistence, empathy, openness, and the ability to deal with rejection. It requires the willingness to be alone with oneself. To be gentle with oneself. To look at the world without blinders on. To observe and withstand what one sees. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks. To be willing to fail - not just once, but again and again, over the course of a lifetime.
Dani ShapiroRead
One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings. People are humanists. Most of them are humanists, that is.
Kurt VonnegutRead
I had to learn to do everything because I couldn't find another kindred soul. Now you see eighty people listed doing the same things I was doing by myself.
Ray HarryhausenRead
In the midst of observing the world and coming to consciousness, I was becoming a writer, and what I wanted to put on the page were the stories of people who looked like me.
Jacqueline WoodsonRead
You can always make a film somehow. You can beg, borrow, steal the equipment, use credit cards, use your friends' goodwill, wheedle your way into this or that situation. The real problem is, how do you get people to see it once it is made?
Walter MurchRead
There's a marvelous sense of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to. It's like trying to write a song, making tiny tweaks, reading it out loud, shifting things to make it sound a certain way... Sometimes it feels like digging out of a hole, but sometimes it feels like flying. When it's working and the rhythm's there, it does feel like magic to me.
Susan OrleanRead