Quotes from Raymond Queneau

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.

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.

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.

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

True stories deal with hunger, imaginary ones with love.

The most heartbreakingly poignant modern love story ever written.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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