Mario Vargas Llosa, the Nobel laureate in literature in 2010 talked Friday about his writing career and works with Chinese writers and readers in Beijing.

On a visit to China during June 12-20, the Peruvian-Spanish writer gave a speech at the Chinese Academy of Social Science (CASS) and met with some Chinese counterparts, like Mo Yan, Liu Zhenyun and Zhang Kangkang.

The trip was co-organized by the CASS and Beijing Cervantes Institute, a Spanish cultural center.

Vargas Llosa, though in his 70s and having no sleep because of the delay of flight, was energetic and humorous during his speech and the conversation.

China is a fascinating country, he said in the speech . After being told that many Chinese female readers like him, he said humorously he would have come to China earlier if he had known that.

He talked about his writing career and the relationship between literature and real life. "Literature must have influence to real life. By the perfect description of life in literature, readers begin to be unsatisfactory with real life and they learn to criticize. This spirit of criticizing is the motive power of social changes," he said.

He named French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and American writher William Faulkner as having the biggest influence on his career.

Sartre's philosophical thoughts of existentialism gave him much inspiration, arousing his enthusiasm of literary creation. He also owed much to Faulkner about the narrative structures.

"I learned how to enrich the literary forms from those American writers, like Hemingway and Faulkner, especially Faulkner," he said.

When asked about his favorite works, he said his books were like his children and he liked them all, but he thought Conversation in the Cathedral was the most typical of his works.

When writing this book, he experienced much pain because he did not know how to arrange the material together, he told the audience.