Quotes from Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio

I wanted to tell you this, too: consciousness is a bad thing. Consciousness is a dead thing. Free yourselves from consciousness! It is high time. All that is needed is to strip off this garment: nothing very difficult about that. Tear the skin from your body, for it is not a true skin, it is a cellophane tissue that blocks the pores, that asphyxiates. Peel the tissue off, peel it off.

The world was a sick animal, a sort of huge cancerous tumour, a thing of bubbling liquids, whitish patches, dribbling pus, fantastic pimples of dead skin that grew in all directions, swelled up, became more and more like fuzzy hair. The right thing would be to go away, to vanish for ever from the face of the sun.

Words are taking their revenge. One day, they break the seals of the phylacteries, and come swarming out like snakes. Another day, they spurt from the labels of the bottles that had held them prisoner, and spread through the black sky with their pterodactyl-like jaws thrust forward like a saw-blade knife. They sweep straight ahead, and as they kill their masters their cries of vengeance can be heard.

Nu se murea sub bombele englezilor È™i ale americanilor. Dar se murea încetul cu încetul, din nemâncare, din lips? de aer, din lips? de libertate, se murea pentru c? oamenii nu mai visau. Marea era doar o dung? albastr? în zare, printre palmieri, pe deasupra acoperiÈ™urilor roÈ™ii.

Descoperea aceast? sl?biciune, îi era ciud? pe ea îns??i, dar nu p?rea s?-i reziste. Dragostea se hr?nea aÈ™adar din aceste himere, sentimentul acesta putea fi atât de impur? Uneori avea impresia c? era o juc?rie, juc?ria iluziilor ei sau juc?ria acelei fete care alterna tristeÈ›ea cu batjocura, cinismul cu naivitatea.

It is not the men who are in command of the bulldozers. It is the bulldozer who invented men, and then, since they failed to interest it, obliterated them with its muscular arm.

My message will be very clear; it is that I think we have to continue to read novels. Because I think that the novel is a very good means to question the current world without having an answer that is too schematic, too automatic. The novelist, he's not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He's someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions.