Romain Gary Quotes & Sayings

Loyalty is not the kind of exclusive deal, it's just a sincere communication and the same values. — Romain Gary

Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him. — Romain Gary

All men have a legend because of death. Humanity wasn't legendary any longer: it was a myth. — Romain Gary

The avantgarde are people who don't exactly know where they want to go, but are the first to get there. — Romain Gary

They thought I suffered from lack of exterior, when I suffered from excess of interior — Romain Gary

With maternal love, life makes a promise at dawn that it can never hold. You are forced to eat cold food until your days end. After that, each time a woman holds you in her arms and against her chest, these are merely condolences. You always come back to yell at your mother's grave like an abandoned dog. Never again, never again, never again. — Romain Gary

A writer's subconscious is one of the filthiest places there are: as a matter of fact, you can find the whole world there. — Romain Gary

He gave up. He'd been feeling like giving up for a long, long time. I guess it's maturity, they say it always gets you in the end. I don't seem to have any more principles left, so it's got to be maturity ... A broken man, I guess that's what you become, the moment you are no longer a kid. — Romain Gary

-I love you, Lenny.
-From the diaphragm.
-What are you talking about?
-You have to say it from the diaphragm. That's a muscle in here. Real deep, not from the throat. I tried to be an actor once and that's the first thing they told me. That's when I quit. I just didn't have that much in my diaphragm. — Romain Gary

As long as you live, you hope. You think that everything will just ... get better. — Romain Gary

If the world can no longer afford the luxury of natural beauty, then it will soon be overcome and destroyed by its own ugliness. — Romain Gary

Disease Carrying thoughts swarm and multiply in the dark and twisted labyrinths of our minds, and all that is needed is a mob and a good political slogan for the epidemic to be spread once again, with a burst of automatic weapons or a mushroom cloud. — Romain Gary

Literature has always been the last refuge, in this world, for those who do not know where to lay their dreaming heads. — Romain Gary

-Would you wish us to invest it for you?
-No, I would like you to set up a trust for dumb animals.
-What kind of dumb animals do you have in mind, Miss Donahue?
-Oh, stray dogs. Rats. Birds.
-We could still invest it for you. Then the animals would get the income without touching the capital.
-No, I don't wish to invest it. I don't want them to get rich. They might become human. — Romain Gary

Men sometimes die much earlier than they are burried. — Romain Gary

There is more to Jewish history than Auschwitz. — Romain Gary

Printing mistakes adds value because of the probability calculus, which makes their intrusion into something problematic and almost impossible, even when everything's conceived, precisely, to avoid the intrusion of human error. — Romain Gary

...all intolerable local situations have become world situations, with the result that the whole world has become a local situation, here, under your nose, staring at you, and when your sensitivity is still alive and not dulled, that is, when you are young, if all you can do is stare back at it helplessly, you run amok, you blow up, you smash whatever is at hand, you express yourself, you seek a release. — Romain Gary

I am weak, I say with no presumptions. I have no merit, I note it, that is all. There are times that I feel so weak there most be a mistake, and as I don't know what I mean with this, I am not going to say anything else — Romain Gary

I see History as a relay race in which one of us, before dropping in his tracks, must carry one stage further the challenge of being a man. — Romain Gary

The trouble with hysteria is that it's contagious. — Romain Gary

Reality is not an inspiration for literature. At its best, literature is an inspiration for reality. — Romain Gary

I've had a lot of fun. Good-bye, and thank you. — Romain Gary

I always had a strong reluctance to hurt people, which is always the best way of hurting oneself. — Romain Gary

The only possible answers are questions. Real Vikings are questions. The answers are what the Vikings chanted during the voyage to keep their spirits up. — Romain Gary

Your generation is suffering from what for lack of a better word I shall call over-debunk. There was a lot of debunking that had to be done, of course. Bigotry, militarism, nationalism, religious intolerance, hypocrisy, phonyness, all sorts of dangerous, ready-made, artificially preserved false values. But your generation and the generation before yours went too far with their debunking job. You went overboard. Over-debunk, that's what you did. It's moral overkill. It's like those insecticides Rachel Carson speaks of in her book, that poison everything, and kill all the nice, useful bugs as well as the bad ones, and in the end poison human beings as well. In the end, it poisons life itself, the very air we breathe. That's what you did, morally and intellectually speaking. Yours is a silent spring. You have overprotected yourselves. You are all no more than twenty, twenty-two years old, but yours is a silent spring, I'm telling you. Nothing sings for you any more. — Romain Gary

If there is something that opens horizons, it is precisely ignorance. — Romain Gary

I don't consider myself to be definite, but in waiting position and eventual appearance — Romain Gary

Islam calls that 'the roots of heaven' and to the Mexican Indians it is the 'tree of life'
the thing that makes both of them fall on their knees and raise their eyes and beat their tormented breasts. [ ... ] Our needs
for justice, for freedom and dignity
are roots of heaven that are deeply embedded in our hearts, but of heaven itself men know nothing but the gripping roots ... — Romain Gary

When a war is won, it's the losers, not the winners, who are liberated. — Romain Gary

All the same I keep on looking for someone incomprehensible who won't understand me either, because I have a terrible thirst for brotherhood — Romain Gary

E was simply a man who had gone even further into loneliness than others - and that's a real exploit, by the way; where breaking records in loneliness is concerned, we're all champions in the field ... he continually repeats: dogs are not enough anymore. People feel so damned lonely, they need company, they need something bigger, stronger, to lean on, something that can really stand up to it all. Dogs aren't enough; what we need is elephants ... — Romain Gary

...the most sacred right of a person is to refuse o be manipulated, handled, cheated, and then kicked in the ass---. — Romain Gary

The only way to prove you are normal is to smash someone's face in — Romain Gary

Humor is a passive form of terrorism, of resistance, and of pseudo-aggression that has less to do with changing the world than with mental hygiene. It is self-therapy... — Romain Gary

Since when one has started dreaming, there were so many cries for help and so many bottles thrown into the sea, that it is amazing we still can see the sea when we should see only bottles. — Romain Gary

I sat day after day in my little room, waiting for inspiration to visit me, trying to invent a pseudonym that would express, in a combination of noble and striking sounds, our dream of artistic achievement, a pen name grand enough to compensate for my own feeling of insecurity and helplessness at the idea of everything my mother expected from me. — Romain Gary

Gari in Russian means "burn!" ... I want to test myself, a trial by fire, so that my I is burned off. — Romain Gary

Literature is greater than any of us, dammit. — Romain Gary

The diplomatic kids had a hectic sort of life, being constantly thrown from one end of the world to the other and always playing tennis, no matter who was being machine-gunned in the streets, you were always extraterritorial, history was not permitted to touch you, it was only buzzing around your tennis court in a bloody sort of way. You were so well protected that you went to pieces. Diplomatic immunity could do very strange things to you, it was like weightlessness. You had to remind yourself constantly that you actually existed, and you were not supposed to identify yourself too much with the suffering of whatever country you were posted to. But then, who needs reality anyway? — Romain Gary

An unbearable reality, combined with the impossibility to change it, tends to lead to abstractions for abstraction's sake, and unreality becomes more realistic than reality itself, more true, more convincing, simply because it looks at you with the eyes of justice. — Romain Gary

Some consciences are fitted with automatic answering machine that work very well. But I never got the technology under control — Romain Gary