Mario Vargas Llosa Quotes

Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.

A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

Art lies by its own artifice.

I love to invent - avoiding the truth. I need to dramatize.

Ghost has always been about make-believe.

I love pretending more than reality.

Grace is always natural, though that does not prevent its being often used to hide a lie. The rude shocks and uncomfortably constraining influences of life disappear among graceful women and poetical men; they are the most deceptive beings in creation; distrust and doubt cannot stand before them; they create what they imagine; if they do not lie to others, they do to their own hearts; for illusion is their element, fiction their vocation, and pleasures in appearance their happiness. Beware of grace in woman, and poetry in man -- weapons the more dangerous because the least dreaded!

Lie. Put down on paper the most interesting lies you can imagine. . .and then make them plausible.

What is a writer of fiction but a liar with a licence?

Poets themselves, tho' liars by profession, always endeavour to give an air of truth to their fictions.

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

Being a writer of fiction isn't like being a compulsive liar, honestly.

In a wonderland they lie, dreaming as the days go by

Only the magic and the dream are true — all the rest's a lie.

Falsehood is a critical element in fiction. Part of the thrill of being told a story is the chance of being hoodwinked. . .The telling of lies is a sort of sleight of hand that displays our deepest feelings about life.

I'm a novelist, and idle speculation is what novelists do. How odd to spend one's life trying to pretend that non-existent people are real: though no odder, I suppose, than what government bureaucrats do, which is trying to pretend that real people are non-existent.

A lie was something that hadn't happened but might just as well have.

I have been only the humblest jugglers-with-facts; and that, in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence--that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disoriented, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.

A kid who has just started to lie is taking the first step as a storyteller.

Well you can't believe everything you read. After all, by definition, fiction writers lie for a living.

In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.

Just because it's a dream doesn't mean it's a lie.

In other words, all of my books are lies. They are simply maps of a territory, shadows of a reality, gray symbols dragging their bellies across the dead page, suffocated signs full of muffled sound and faded glory, signifying absolutely nothing. And it is the nothing, the Mystery, the Emptiness alone that needs to be realized: not known but felt, not thought but breathed, not an object but an atmosphere, not a lesson but a life.

Is it wrong to trust in a beautiful lie if it helps you get through life?

No. I cannot expect you to believe it. Take it as a lie--or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction. Treat my assertion of its truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest. And taking it as a story, what do you think of it?