"One can't fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser."
- Mario Vargas Llosa
"Writers are the exorcists of their own demons."
"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 ..."
"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 writin..."
"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 exp..."
"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, a..."
"We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal."
"Living is worth the effort if only because without life we could not read or imagine stories."
"Because of literature we can decipher, at least partially, the hieroglyphic that existence tends to be for the great majority of human beings."
"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..."