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
What this quote means
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.
Themes
LiteratureRebellionCritical ThinkingPowerIdeas
In practice
Example use cases
In a book club discussion about social issues, this quote can be used to highlight the importance of literature in fostering critical dialogue.
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.
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
It perhaps might be said--if any one dared--that the most worthless literature of the world has been that which has been written by the men of one nation concerning the men of another.
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What makes a book great, a so-called classic, it its quality of always being modern, of its author, though he be long dead, continuing to speak to each new generation.
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The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages.
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Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.
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My father, if anything, first and last, was a man of words. He loved stories; he didn't live for stories, exactly, but I think he lived through stories. I think, like many writers, he loved stories about things he had experienced as much as, if not more than, he loved the experiences themselves.
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The disappointing second novel is measured against the brilliant first novel - often no novel lives up to the first. Literary improvement seems like an unfair expectation.
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