Great Throughts Treasury

"Violence represents the worst kind of conformism."

"No democracy is born perfect, and none ever gets to be perfect. Yet democracy is superior to authoritarian and totalitarian regimes because, unlike them, democracy is perfectible."

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

"From the cave to the skyscraper, from the club to weapons of mass destruction, from the tautological life of the tribe to the era of globalization, the fictions of literature have multiplied human experiences, preventing us from succumbing to lethargy, self-absorption, resignation. Nothing has sown so much disquiet, so disturbed our imagination and our desires as the life of lies we add, thanks to literature, to the one we have, so we can be protagonists in the great adventures, the great passions real life will never give us. The lies of literature become truths through us, the readers transformed, infected with longings and, through the fault of fiction, permanently questioning a mediocre reality. Sorcery, when literature offers us the hope of having what we do not have, being what we are not, acceding to that impossible existence where like pagan gods we feel mortal and eternal at the same time, that introduces into our spirits non-conformity and rebellion, which are behind all the heroic deeds that have contributed to the reduction of violence in human relationships. Reducing violence, not ending it. Because ours will always be, fortunately, an unfinished story. That is why we have to continue dreaming, reading, and writing, the most effective way we have found to alleviate our mortal condition, to defeat the corrosion of time, and to transform the impossible into possibility."

"The writer’s job is to write with rigor, with commitment, to defend what they believe with all the talent they have. I think that’s part of the moral obligation of a writer, which cannot be only purely artistic. I think a writer has some kind of responsibility at least to participate in the civic debate. I think literature is impoverished, if it becomes cut from the main agenda of people, of society, of life."

"At times I wondered whether writing was not a solipsistic luxury in countries like mine, where there were scant readers, so many people who were poor and illiterate, so much injustice, and where culture was a privilege of the few. These doubts, however, never stifled my calling, and I always kept writing even during those periods when earning a living absorbed most of my time. I believe I did the right thing, since if, for literature to flourish, it was first necessary for a society to achieve high culture, freedom, prosperity, and justice, it never would have existed. But thanks to literature, to the consciousness it shapes, the desires and longings it inspires, and our disenchantment with reality when we return from the journey to a beautiful fantasy, civilization is now less cruel than when storytellers began to humanize life with their fables. 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."

"Do the rhetorical quarrels of bourgeois political parties have anything to do with the interests of the humble and downtrodden?"

"Everything is done halfway in Peru, and that is why everything goes wrong."

"A clean conscience might help you to get into heaven. but it won't help your career."

"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."

"Eroticism has its own moral justification because it says that pleasure is enough for me; it is a statement of the individual's sovereignty."

"Death isn't enough. It doesn't remove the stain. But a slap, a whiplash, square on the face, does. Because a man's face is as sacred as his mother or his wife."

"He is always furious, on account of what he finds out or what he doesn't find out."

"Good literature erects bridges between different peoples, and by having us enjoy, suffer, or feel surprise, unites us beneath the languages, beliefs, habits, customs, and prejudices that separate us."

"He was a man in the prime of his life, his fifties... broad forehead, aquiline nose, penetrating gaze, the very soul of rectitude and goodness."

"I was very young and lived with my grandparents in a villa with white walls in the Calle Ocharan, in Miraflores."

"I learned to read at the age of five, in Brother Justiniano?s class at the De la Salle Academy in Cochabamba, Bolivia. It is the most important thing that has ever happened to me. Almost seventy years later I remember clearly how the magic of translating the words in books into images enriched my life, breaking the barriers of time and space..."

"I always write a draft version of the novel in which I try to develop, not the story, not the plot, but the possibilities of the plot. I write without thinking much, trying to overcome all kinds of self-criticism, without stopping, without giving any consideration to the style or structure of the novel, only putting down on paper everything that can be used as raw material, very crude material for later development in the story."

"I convinced her that her first loyalty isn't to other people, but to her own feelings."

"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."

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

"It is the case that, albeit to a lesser extent, all fictions make their readers live the impossible, taking them out of themselves, breaking down barriers, and making them share, by identifying with the characters of the illusion, a life that is richer, more intense, or more abject and violent, or simply different from the one that they are confined to by the high-security prison that is real life. Fictions exist because of this fact. Because we have only one life, and our desires and fantasies demand a thousand lives. Because the abyss between what we are and what we would like to be has to be bridged somehow. That was why fictions were born: so that, through living this vicarious, transient, precarious, but also passionate and fascinating life that fiction transports us to, we can incorporate the impossible into the possible and our existence can be both reality and unreality, history and fable, concrete life and marvelous adventure."

"It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator."

"It is easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it."

"It?s easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it."

"It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around."

"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."

"Life is a shit-storm, in which art is our only umbrella."

"Lima frightened him, it was too big, you could lose yourself in it and never find your way home; the people on the street were total strangers."

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

"Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections."

"Now we have Peronism that is everything: it's the far right and it?s the center, it's left centrist and is also extreme leftist, it is democracy and is also terrorism, its demagogy is also insanity... Peronism is everything."

"Literature creates a fraternity within human diversity and eclipses the frontiers erected among men and women by ignorance, ideologies, religions, languages, and stupidity."

"One can't fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser."

"Revolution will free society of its afflictions, while science will free the individual of his."

"Reading changed dreams into life and life into dreams."

"Reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life."

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

"?Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure... but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness."

"Science is still only a candle glimmering in a great pitch-dark cavern."

"That is one thing I am sure of amid my many uncertainties regarding the literary vocation: deep inside, a writer feels that writing is the best thing that ever happened to him, or could ever happen to him, because as far as he is concerned, writing is the best possible way of life, never mind the social, political, or financial rewards of what he might achieve through it."

"Since it is impossible to know what's really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream and take refuge in illusion. Because of these strange circumstances, Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary."

"The secret to happiness, at least to peace of mind, is knowing how to separate sex from love. And, if possible, eliminating romantic love from your life, which is the love that makes you suffer. That way, I assure you, you live with greater tranquility and enjoy things more."

"The sort of decision arrived at by saints and madmen is not revealed to others. It is forged little by little, in the folds of the spirit, tangential to reason, shielded from indiscreet eyes, not seeking the approval of others?who would never grant it?until it is at last put into practice. I imagine that in the process?the conceiving of a project and its ripening into action?the saint, the visionary, or the madman isolates himself more and more, walling himself up in solitude, safe from the intrusion of others."

"There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity."

"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."

"We all believe in the regulations, but you have to know how to interpret them."

"When you start having bad luck, there isn't an end to it."

"Why would anyone who is deeply satisfied with reality, with real life as it is lived, dedicate himself to something as insubstantial and fanciful as the creation of fictional realities? Naturally, those who rebel against lie as it is, using their ability to invent different lives and different people, may do so for any number of reasons, honorable or dishonorable, generous or selfish, complex or banal. The nature of this basic questioning of reality, which to my mind lies at the heart of every literary calling, doesn't matter at all. What matters is that the rejection be strong enough to fuel the enthusiasm for a task as quixotic as tilting at windmills ? the slight-of-hand replacement of the concrete, objective world of life as it is lived with the subtle and ephemeral world of fiction."

"Writers are the exorcists of their own demons."