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"No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing."
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"Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair."
"I've found a different way to scent the air: already it's a by-word for despair."
"We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else."
"Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair."
"Living on pills, phone calls unmade, people unseen, pages unwritten, money unmade, pressure piling up all around to make some kind of breakthrough and get moving again. Get the gum off the rails, finish something, croak this awful habit of not ever getting to the end- of anything."
"The only difference was one of them was trying to make a perfect cake and one of them was trying to write a great book. But if we remove that from the equation, it's the same impulse and they are equally entitled to their ecstasies and their despair."
"Despair is a narcotic. It lulls the mind into indifference."
"I killed four flies while waiting. Damn, death was everywhere. Man, bird, beast, reptile, rodent, insect, fish didn't have a chance. The fix was in. I didn't know what to do about it. I got depressed. You know, I see a boy at the supermarket, he's packing my groceries, then I see him sticking himself into his own grave along with the toilet paper, the beer and the chicken breasts."
"To doubt is worse than to have lost; and to despair is but to antedate those miseries that must fall on us."
Explore more quotes by Mario Vargas Llosa
"Prosperity or egalitarianism - you have to choose. I favor freedom - you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion."
"Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories."
"Eroticism has its own moral justification because it says that pleasure is enough for me; it is a statement of the individual's sovereignty."
"If you are killed because you are a writer, that's the maximum expression of respect, you know."
"You cannot teach creativity - how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be."
"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."
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