Raymond Queneau Quotes

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

  Raymond Queneau

  Men, Doe, Ascending

  Raymond Queneau (2000). “Zazie in the metro”, Penguin Books Ltd

  46 Copy quote

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

  Raymond Queneau

  Concerned

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Raymond Queneau

  Education, Ideas, Knowledge Learning

  11 Copy quote

• True stories deal with hunger, imaginary ones with love.

  Raymond Queneau

  Stories, Hunger, True Story

  6 Copy quote

• Religions tend to disappear with man's good fortune.

  Raymond Queneau

  Men, Religion, Disappear

  14 Copy quote

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

  Raymond Queneau

  Dream, Work, Men

  11 Copy quote

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

  Raymond Queneau

  Wisdom, Culture, Study

  4 Copy quote

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

  Raymond Queneau

  Odyssey, Iliad, Seems

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Raymond Queneau

  Party, Hero, Character

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Raymond Queneau

  Fall, Inspiration, Waiting

  4 Copy quote

• The most heartbreakingly poignant modern love story ever written.

  Raymond Queneau

  Stories, Love Story, Modern

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Raymond Queneau

  Character, Historical, Important

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Raymond Queneau

  Character, Views, Interesting

  6 Copy quote

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

  Raymond Queneau

  Odyssey, Ulysses, Ends

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Raymond Queneau

  Epic, Singing, Identity

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Raymond Queneau

  Historical, Stories, Sides

  4 Copy quote

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

  Raymond Queneau

  Running, War, Rare Moments

  18 Copy quote

• All societies are historical.

  Raymond Queneau

  Historical

  4 Copy quote

• All confessions are Odysseys.

  Raymond Queneau

  Odyssey, Confession

  7 Copy quote

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

  Raymond Queneau

  People, Iliad, Disorder

  8 Copy quote

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

  Raymond Queneau

  Fiction, Odyssey, Iliad

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Raymond Queneau

  Character, Historical Value, Fiction

  8 Copy quote

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

  Raymond Queneau

  Personality, Stories, Odyssey

  10 Copy quote

• 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.

  Raymond Queneau

  Character, Historical, Events

  6 Copy quote

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

  Raymond Queneau

  Rehabilitation, Iliad, Creation

  7 Copy quote

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