Llosa On Writing

The always-impressive Mario Vargas Llosa has written historical novels, erotic tales, memoirs, short stories, comic novels, a murder mystery, an essay collection, a study of Madame Bovary and other nonfiction. In an interview with Beirut's Daily Star -- at the end of a a regional speaking tour in Lebanon -- he answers why: "I consider writing a kind of adventure. I don't want to repeat myself, doing things that I have already done. No, because that would impoverish something for me that is very fresh, very new always. And that's why my books are very different, one from the other ... Even the writing is different because it depends very much on what you want to tell ... You have to find the way it is with each story.

"That is something that I learned reading Faulkner, that anything can become the most important, the most deep human experience, if you have the ability to reach this story or this situation, linking it with the human condition in general."