Mario Vargas Llosa on "In Praise of Reading and Fiction"

Mario Vargas Llosa's Nobel prize speech:

• "Mario Vargas Llosa - Nobel Lecture: In Praise of Reading and Fiction". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2013. Web. 6 Aug 2013.
• Ebook (same as above link)
• Alan Cheuse contrasts Vargas Llosa's speech against Philip Roth's on why he's hanging up his writing hat.
  
  In praise of reading: 
• "[Reading] is the most important thing that ever happened to me."
• "Reading changed dreams into life and life into dreams and placed the universe of literature within reach of the boy I once was."
• "[C]ivilization is now less cruel than when storytellers began to humanize life with their fables."
  
  On writing motivation and models:
• "[T]he first things I wrote were continuations of the stories I read because it made me sad when they concluded or because I wanted to change their endings."
• "Fortunately, the masters were there, teachers to learn from."
• "[H]eroism and the epic are as possible in the present"