Best 27 quotes of Raymond Queneau on MyQuotes

All confessions are Odysseys.

A very great Iliad... concerns the creation of a nation.

Fiction has consisted either of placing imaginary characters in a true story, which is the Iliad, or of presenting the story of an individual as having a general historical value, which is the Odyssey.

Happy nations have no history. History is the study of mankind's misfortune.

It doesn't seem to me that anyone has discovered much that's new since the Iliad or the Odyssey.

It is the creator of fiction's point of view; it is the character who interests him. Sometimes he wants to convince the reader that the story he is telling is as interesting as universal history.

Learning to learn is to know how to navigate in a forest of facts, ideas and theories, a proliferation of constantly changing items of knowledge. Learning to learn is to know what to ignore but at the same time not rejecting innovation and research.

Man's usual routine is to work and to dream and work and dream.

Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything.

One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey.

Religions tend to disappear with man's good fortune.

The Iliad is the private lives of people thrown into disorder by history.

The Odyssey is the story of someone who, in the course of diverse experiences, acquires a personality or affirms and recovers his personality.

The most heartbreakingly poignant modern love story ever written.

The Odyssey is the story of Americans up to the point where they are well-established, and even so it is detached from the historical side.

The poet is never inspired, because he is the master of that which appears to others as inspiration. He does not wait for inspiration to fall out of the heavens like roasted ortolans. He knows how to hunt...He is never inspired because he is unceasingly inspired, because the powers of poetry are always at his disposition, subjected to his will, submissive to his own activity.

There have been only rare moments in history where individual histories were able to run their course without wars or revolutions.

To have one's own story told by a third party who doesn't know that the character in question is himself the hero of the story being told, that's a technical refinement.

True stories deal with hunger, imaginary ones with love.

Ulysses finds himself unchanged, aside from his experience, at the end of his odyssey.

We have gotten away from this double aspect of either putting the character back into historical events or of making a historical event of his very life.

When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn't interested any longer. That's very astonishing.

He sought an adventure but didn't find one. He was inexperienced and besides he didn't have too much imagination.

His thoughts were hemmed in. One can only draw curved lines on the terrestrial sphere which, as they extend, forever meet with themselves. At such intersections we always encounter what we have already seen.

L'instruction! Voyez ce que c'est, monsieur, que l'instruction. On apprend quelque chose à l'école, on se donne même du mal, beaucoup de mal, pour apprendre quelque chose à l'école, et puis vingt ans après, ou même avant, ce n'est plus ça, les choses ont changé, on ne sait plus rien, alors vraiment ce n'était pas la peine. Aussi je préfère penser qu'apprendre.

Mais Turandot sort brusquement de son bistrot et, du bas des marches, il lui crie : "Eh petite, où vas-tu comme ça ?" Zazie ne lui rèpond pas, elle se contente d'allonger le pas.

When you have a past, Vovonne, you'll realize what an odd thing it is. In the first place, there's whole chunks of it that have caved in: absolutely nothing left. Elsewhere, there's weeds that've grown haphazard, and you can't recognize anything there either. And then there's places that you think are so beautiful that you give them a fresh coat of paint every year, sometimes in one color, sometimes in another, and they end up not looking in the least like what they were. Not counting the things we thought very simple and unmysterious when they happened, but which years later we discover aren't so obvious, like sometimes you pass a thing every day and don't notice it and then all of a sudden you see it.