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
Literature is dangerous: it awakens a rebellious attitude in us.
Interpretation
Literature provokes critical thinking and challenges the status quo.
This quote highlights the transformative power of literature, suggesting that it stirs a sense of rebellion and critical questioning within individuals. By engaging with literary works, readers often challenge societal norms and explore new ideas, which can lead to change and innovation in thought and behavior.
In practice
In a book club discussion about social issues, this quote can be used to highlight the importance of literature in fostering critical dialogue.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.
Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers.
Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.
An unread author is an author who is a victim of the worst kind of censorship, indifference - a censorship more effective than the Ecclesiastical Index.
Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach.
In novels, and American novels in particular, it's not just about redemption, it's about forward movement and healing oneself. Americans are very big on getting better.
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