Raymond Queneau Quotations

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

After the magical act accomplished by Joyce with Ulysses, perhaps we are getting away from it.

It seems to me that an author who has determined very new domains in literature is Gertrude Stein.

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.

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.

When One made love to Zero, spheres embraced their arches and prime numbers caught their breath

We think of giving importance to history, but it is the individual who is interesting, and we want to give him a historical importance.

In the Odyssey, there are technical refinements which are extremely remarkable, and I'm surprised they aren't mentioned more often.

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...

True stories deal with hunger, imaginary ones with love.

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

All confessions are Odysseys.

All societies are historical.

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.

It isn’t happiness I am concerned with but experience.

The most heartbreakingly poignant modern love story ever written.

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

Being or nothing, that is the question. Ascending, descending, coming, going, a man does so much that in the end he disappears.