Quotes by French Authors - Page 132

Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.
Napoléon Bonaparte
Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.
Voltaire
Toutes les erreurs de la critique commises à mon égard, à mes débuts, furent qu'elle ne vit pas qu'il ne fallait rien définir, rien comprendre, rien limiter, rien préciser, parce que tout ce qui est sincèrement et docilement nouveau - comme le beau d'ailleurs, porte sa signification en soi-même. La désignation par un titre mis à mes dessins est quelquefois de trop, pour ainsi dire. Le titre n'y est justifié que lorsqu'il est vague, indéterminé, et visant même confusément à l'équivoque. Mes dessins inspirent et ne se définissent pas. Ils ne déterminent rien. Ils nous placent, ainsi que la musique, dans le monde ambigu de l'indéterminé. Ils sont une sorte de métaphore.
Odilon Redon
I’d loved women who were old and who were young; those extra kilos and large rumps, and others so thin there was barely even skin to pinch, and every time I held them, I worried I would snap them in two. But for all of these: where they had merited my love was in their delicious smell. Scent is such a powerful tool of attraction, that if a woman has this tool perfectly tuned, she needs no other. I will forgive her a large nose, a cleft lip, even crossed-eyes; and I’ll bathe in the jouissance of her intoxicating odour.
Roman Payne
Face au questionnement sur l'existence de Dieu, se présentent trois types d'individus honnêtes, le croyant qui dit: «Je ne sais pas mais je crois que oui», l'athée qui dit: «Je ne sais pas mais je crois que non», l'indifférent qui dit : «Je ne sais pas et je m'en moque.»L'escroquerie commence chez celui qui clame: «Je sais !» Qu'il affirme : «Je sais que Dieu existe» ou «Je sais que Dieu n'existe pas», il outrepasse les pouvoirs de la raison, il vire à l'intégrisme ... En notre siècle où, comme jadis, on tue au nom de Dieu, il importe de ne pas amalgamer les croyants et les imposteurs : les amis de Dieu restent ceux qui le cherchent, pas ceux qui parlent à Sa place en prétendant L'avoir trouvé.
Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt
Scent is such a powerful tool of attraction, that if a woman has this tool perfectly tuned, she needs no other. I will forgive her a large nose, a cleft lip, even crossed-eyes; and I’ll bathe in the jouissance of her intoxicating odour.
Roman Payne
N'ayez jamais peur de la vie, n'ayez jamais peur de l'aventure, faites confiance au hasard, à la chance, à la destinée. Partez, allez conquérir d'autres espaces, d'autres espérances. Le reste vous sera donné de surcroît.
Henry de Monfreid
Le monde est la résultante de nos actes individuels.
Laurent Gounelle
There are three sources of belief: reason, custom, inspiration.
Blaise Pascal
So, fatality will play me these terrible tricks. The elements themselves conspire to overwhelm me with mortification. Air, fire, and water combine their united efforts to oppose my passage. Well, they shall see what the earnest will of a determined man can do. I will not yield, I will not retreat even one inch; and we shall see who shall triumph in this great contest - man or nature.
Jules Verne
What do you care if people talk? Those who talk cannot harm you. Why should you be worried? You should only think about those things that please you. You have only one life in this world: soon you'll reach your eternal rest.
Christine de Pizan
Admirer quelqu'un, s'inspirer de son parcours, c'est avant tout grandir et devenir soi.
Amandine Roche
Que les poètes morts laissent la place aux autres. Et nous pourrions tout de même voir que c'est notre vénération devant ce qui a été déjà fait, si beau et si valable que ce soit, qui nous pétrifie, qui nous stabilise et nous empêche de prendre contact avec la force qui est dessous, que l'on appelle l'énergie pensante, la force vitale, le déterminisme des échanges, les menstrues de la lune ou tout ce qu'on voudra.
Antonin Artaud
Inspiration comes unawares, from unaccountable sources that have nothing to do with planning or intelligence. Let it cool ever so slightly, and you are left, pen or brush in hand, with no inspiration at all. Gifted people need not, therefore, make a song and dance about being or supposing themselves superior. They simply happened to be born with that fortunate, subconscious equipment of theirs, and the mystery exists independently of intelligence or ambition.
Maurice Chevalier
Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask 'how', while others of a more curious nature will ask 'why'. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.
Man Ray
For a true artist, difficulties become opportunities and clouds become solid present.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
The poet is much more the one who inspires,than the one who is inspired.
Paul Éluard
...we have to surpass ourselves every day, make every day undying. Climb our own personal Everest and do it in such a way that every step is a little bit of eternity. That's what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people.
Muriel Barbery
In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.
Simone Weil
Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.
Rashi
The ‘Muse’ is not an artistic mystery, but a mathematical equation. The gift are those ideas you think of as you drift to sleep. The giver is that one you think of when you first awake.
Roman Payne
Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.
Anaïs Nin
And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day a novel should not be interrupted.
François Mauriac
And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written. (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great-that is for "great men"; and it's "silly."Besides, you've written a little, but in secret. And it wasn't good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn't go all the way, or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty-so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time.
Hélène Cixous
You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.
Gustave Flaubert
And so too, in later years, when I began to write a book of my own, and the quality of some sentences seemed so inadequate that I could not make up my mind to go on with the undertaking. I would find the equivalent in Bergotte. But it was only then, when I read them in his pages, that I could enjoy them; when it was I myself who composed them, in my anxiety that they should exactly reproduce what I had perceived in my mind's eye, and in my fear of their not turning out "true to life," how could I find time to ask myself whether what I was writing was pleasing!
Marcel Proust
To write is your last resort when you've betrayed someone.
Jean Genet
Because of the earth’s roundness, Genghis Khan, in the fever of possession and destruction, hastened his own overthrow by invading lands that he had already razed and conquered. Not only is it impossible to know from where we come, but also from whom we come: nothing in common, in any case, with those who pass for being the “authors of our days” – which days? Better to invent a genealogy based on pure whim and the leanings of our hearts, but what if they don’t agree?
André Breton
Well then – I see two ways of letting things take their course – Create one’s own sensations with the help of a flamboyant collision of rare words – not often, mind you – or else neatly draw the angles, the squares, the entire geometry of feelings – those of the moment, naturally.
Jacques Vaché
It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, you don’t get horny enough to actually to father them.
Gustave Flaubert
The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.
Gustave Flaubert
For me the thing that signals a great story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it detaches itself from its author like a soap bubble blown from a clay pipe.
Julio Cortázar
The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice.
Julio Cortázar
The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.
Julio Cortázar
Almost all great writers have as their motif, more or less disguised, the passage from childhood to maturity, the clash between the thrill of expectation and the disillusioning knowledge of truth. 'Lost Illusion' is the undisclosed title of every novel.
André Maurois
Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature is nevertheless only conceivable in terms of a desire for fundamental communication with the reader.
Georges Bataille
No, she laughed." How on earth could that be done? If you try to laugh and say ‘No’ at the same time, it sounds like neighing — yet people are perpetually doing it in novels. If they did it in real life they would be locked up.
Hilaire Belloc
It is not my words that I polish, but my ideas. 102
Joseph Joubert
To fly/steal is woman’s gesture, to steal into language to make it fly.
Hélène Cixous
But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined.
Charles Nodier
The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.
Colette
After reading Edgar Allan Poe. Something the critics have not noticed: a new literary world pointing to the literature of the 20th Century. Scientific miracles, fables on the pattern A+ B, a clear-sighted, sickly literature. No more poetry but analytic fantasy. Something monomaniacal. Things playing a more important part than people; love giving away to deductions and other forms of ideas, style, subject and interest. The basis of the novel transferred from the heart to the head, from the passion to the idea, from the drama to the denouement.
Jules de Goncourt
The paper is patient, but the reader is not.
Joseph Joubert
Whoever has received knowledgeand eloquence in speech from Godshould not be silent or secretivebut demonstrate it willingly.When a great good is widely heard of,then, and only then, does it bloom,and when that good is praised by man,it has spread its blossoms.
Marie de France
He reflected. 'I know a lot of different kids of people what I want is to show each of them how the others really are. You hear so many lies!
Simone de Beauvoir
Writing is the delicate, difficult, and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the unavowable.
Hélène Cixous
He showed, in a few words, that it is not sufficient to throw together a few incidents that are to be met with in every romance, and that to dazzle the spectator the thought should be new, without being farfetched; frequently sublime, but always natural; the author should have a thorough knowledge of the human heart and make it speak properly; he should be a complete poet, without showing an affectation of it in any of the characters of his piece; he should be a perfect master of his language, speak it with all its pruity and with the utmost harmony, and yet so as not to make the sense a slave to the rhyme. Whoever, added he, neglects any one of these rules, though he may write two or three tragedies with tolerable success, will never be reckoned in the number of good authors.
Voltaire
Le livre est un morceau de silence dans les mains du lecteur. Celui qui écrit se tait. Celui qui lit ne rompt pas le silence.
Pascal Quignard
To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not--this is the beginning of writing.
Roland Barthes
J'ai un but, une tâche, disons le mot, une passion. Le métier d'écrire en est une violente et presque indestructible."[Letter to Jules Boucoiran, 4 March 1831]
George Sand
In his earliest youth, he had drawn inspiration from really bad authors, as you may have seen from his style; as he grew older, he lost his taste for them, but the excellent authors just didn’t fill him with the same enthusiasm
Gustave Flaubert
Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature
Julio Cortázar
A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on.
Marcel Proust
If you are alone, tell some stories to yourself. This is a different kind of pleasure and it has, indeed, its reward. I have tasted a little of everything, and I have truly never enjoyed anything more.
Charles Nodier
I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop.
Gustave Flaubert
The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with it a tangible loss but also a total engagement that, on another level, lends the theater its unparalleled imperfection faced with the perfection of film.I don’t want to write anything but takes.
Julio Cortázar
I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.
Julio Cortázar
It's always been difficult for me to speak and express my innermost thoughts. I prefer to write. When I sit down and write, words grow very docile, they come and feed out of my hand like little birds, and I can do almost what I want with them; whereas when I try to marshal them in open air, they fly away from me.
Philippe Claudel
In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul
Albert Camus