Quote collection
355 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"It's so easy to be mistaken about the future. Sometimes there are avant-gardes which believe themselves to be the avant-garde and which later find themselves to be absolutely dated."
"You can't define the future. And in my opinion, you can't define the avant-garde."
"If you haven't been happy very young, you can still be happy later on, but it's much harder. You need more luck."
"To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error which hints on active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simpily an all-pervasive system."
"... to adapt one's outlook to another person's salvation is the surest and quickest way of losing him."
"If you try consciously to be avant-garde, it's a little dangerous, like the present state of modern painting, where dealers try to be avant-garde, and under this pretext, painters take some old scraps and call it avant-garde."
"Choice springs from the totality of the person. Thus, to study, to analyze what a person is, does not eliminate the idea of freedom."
"Literature in France seems to be undergoing a crisis now, and nothing comes immediately to mind."
"The time that one gains cannot be accumulated in a storehouse; it is contradictory to want to save up existence, which, the fact is, exists only by being spent and there is a good case for showing that airplanes, machines, the telephone, and the radio do not make men of today happier than those of former times."
"There has to be a certain relationship between the life and the writing style, and that is really a problem."
"You can't address yourself to women by speaking a language which no average woman will understand. In my opinion, it's wrong."
"If the writer is a woman, feminist or not, it will give the language something that it would not have if it had been used by a man."
"from one minute to the next the present is merely an honorary past. It must be filled unceasingly anew to dissemble the curse it carries within itself; that is why Americans like speed, alcohol, thriller films and any sensational news: the demand for new things, and ever newer things, is feverish since nowhere will they rest."
"The arrogance of some Christians would close heaven to them if, to their misfortune, it existed."
"Indeed, there is nothing more arbitrary than intervening as a stranger in a destiny which is not ours."