Art & Creativity Quote by Mario Vargas Llosa

Loneliness is the toll Vargas Llosa insists we pay for making a world on the page. He’s not romanticizing the garret; he’s describing the necessary distortion of ordinary life that long-form writing demands. “Totally cut off” reads like both complaint and prescription: the novelist has to sever the social feedback loops that keep most people calibrated. A book can’t be drafted in the same mental weather as errands, small talk, and the daily drip of other people’s needs.

The second sentence sharpens the psychological cost. “Submerged” suggests drowning, not meditation. The writer doesn’t simply consult “obsessions and memories”; he sinks into them until they become the medium he breathes. That’s a telling choice from an author whose fiction often excavates power, violence, and desire with almost clinical stamina. For Vargas Llosa, the novel is built from private fixations and personal history, but the process requires amplifying those materials beyond comfort. You don’t get to keep a polite distance from your own mind; you move in.

There’s also a sly defense here against the myth of effortless inspiration. By framing book-writing as “business,” he makes it labor: routine, endurance, an occupation with hazards. Coming from a writer shaped by Latin America’s turbulent political eras and his own public intellectual life, the remark carries extra bite. The more engaged you are with the world, the more drastic the withdrawal required to recreate it truthfully. The book is social in impact; the making of it, brutally antisocial.