"Writers are the exorcists of their own demons."
— Mario Vargas Llosa

"I was very young and lived with my grandparents in a villa with white walls in the Calle Ocharan, in Miraflores."
— Mario Vargas Llosa (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter: A Novel)

"Es más fácil imaginar la muerte de una persona que la de cien o mil...Multiplicado, el sufrimiento se vuelve abstracto. No es fácil conmoverse por cosas abstractas."
— Mario Vargas Llosa

"But what do I have? The things I'm told and the things I tell, that's all. And as far as I know, that never yet made anyone fly."
— Mario Vargas Llosa (The Storyteller: A Novel)

"No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing."
— Mario Vargas Llosa

"Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present."
— Mario Vargas Llosa

"Science is still only a candle glimmering in a great pitch-dark cavern."
— Mario Vargas Llosa (War of the End of the World)

"Las mentiras machacadas día y noche se vuelven verdades."
— Mario Vargas Llosa

"It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator."
— Mario Vargas Llosa (Letters to a Young Novelist)

"Science is still only a candle faintly glimmering in a great pitch-dark cavern."
— Mario Vargas Llosa (War of the End of the World)