Online discussion Mario Vargas Llosa's Interview

• Introduction:-

         Mario Vargas Llosa the Peruvian novelist, was awarded the nobal prize for literature in 2010. His most recent novel is The Neighbourhood. He was interviewed for the wordpost by Michael Skafidas, a journalist and professor of comparative literature at the city University of new York.


His quote:-

      No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.

If you are killed because you are a writer, that's the maximum expression of respect, you know.

Prosperity or egalitarianism - you have to choose. I favor freedom - you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.

We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal

            

• The power of idea :- Young people today tend to think that images can form modern creative citizens. They don’t. Images create a passive citizen, more easily domesticated than the citizen formed by ideas

• History and literature are faces of a coin. They are so close, and in many cases, the literary version of a historical part prevails over a historian’s account.