J M G Clezio Quotes & Sayings

The fact is, that for the Huichol, and for all those who refuse, who are in flight, words and things are precisely what language does not speak about. Language is a natural act which implies belonging. He who exists, speaks. He who does not speak, does not exist. He has no place in the world. The Huichol language is Huichol to the same degree as the Huichol earth, the Huichol sky, religion, tattooing, dress, the peyoteros' hat. It is not enough to pronounce the syllables of the Huichol language to be Huichol. That is obvious. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

[W]hat is one to say of the writer who lies when he writes that he is lying? — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

I have the feeling of being a very small item on this planet, and literature enables me to express that. — J.M.G. Le Clezio

Nights are long when it's cold and you're waiting for a train. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

He who writes books that aim to convince is a comedian, too, just a comedian. What has he got to offer others, apart from chains, still more chains? Fiction never liberated anyone. No one ever brought anything back from voyages through dream worlds. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

The earth is neither fabulous nor paradisal. And therefore it is not hell. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

All words are possible, then, all names. They rain down, all these words, they disintegrate into a powdery avalanche. Belched from the volcano's mouth, they spurt in to the sky, then fall again. In the quivering air, like gelatine, the sounds trace their bubble paths. Can you imagine that? — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

Each time a drop of water forms under the spout of a tap, it means that one can wrench something away from the nameless mass. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

Language is the most extraordinary invention in the history of humanity, the one which came before everything and which makes it possible to share everything. — J.M.G. Le Clezio

If I examine the circumstances which inspired me to write - and this is not mere self-indulgence, but a desire for accuracy - I see clearly that the starting point of it all for me was war. — J.M.G. Le Clezio

My English is closer to the literary English, and I'm not very familiar with jokes in English or with, you know, with small talk in English. — J.M.G. Le Clezio

I'm used to shifting languages because my father used to speak to us, to my brother and I, he used to speak in English. He wanted us to be quite fluent in English, especially when he was trying to correct our behavior; he would do that in English. — J.M.G. Le Clezio

One day is enough to master reading in Korean. Hangeul is a very scientific and convenient alphabet system for communication. — J.M.G. Le Clezio

human beings, cans of living preserves — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

The non-stop music wrapped a warm cocoon around her body. People's thoughts, rapid words flowed around her, without doing her any harm. She was part and parcel of the shop, a commodity like any other, an article in the first-floor department. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

I thought that to get to know a desert it was enough to have been there. I thought that to have seen the dogs dying along the Cholula road, or to have seen the eyes of the lepers at Chiengmai gave me the right to talk about it. To have seen! To have been there! Rubbish! The world is not a book, it proves nothing. The spaces one has crossed were dark corridors with closed doors. The faces of the women to whom one gave oneself up completely: did they speak for anyone but themselves? The cities of man are secret. One walks along their streets, one sees them shine under one's feet, but one is not there, one never enters them. The dusty fields inhabited by people who are hungry, who wait patiently, are paradises of luxury and nourishment; shining at a vast distance from intelligence, at a vast distance from reason. They are not to be subjugated. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

In their purest form myths, not unlike tragedy, are perhaps the most important moment in the troubled history of Mexican civilization. The cement of dreams, the architecture of language, made of images and rhythms which respond to and harmonize with each other through time and space, their wisdom is not of that which can be measured on the scale of the everyday. They are concurrently religion, ritual, belief, phantasmagoria, and the primary affirmation of a human coherence, the coagulating strength of language against the anguish of death and the certainty of nothingness. Myths express life, despite the promise of destruction, of the weight of the inevitable. They are without any doubt the most durable monuments of men, in America as in the ancient world. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

Maybe it was Roumiya's beauty that drove me away, her silent beauty, her eyes that seemed to be looking through everythig and draining it of all meaning. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

They were the men and the women of the sand, of the wind, of the light, of the night. They appeared as in a dream, at the crest of a dune, as if they were born of the cloudless sky. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

Now I know that without mirrors we are different, we're not really the same ... Maybe they had noticed us looking worriedly at other people's faces, as if we wee trying to see in them what we had become — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

I can understand better than most the contradiction between the idealistic civilisation and religious morals of Europe and what they did with the slaves, because the root of the evil is only two generations away from me. Maybe this has fed my need to fight against the abuses of modern civilisation. — J.M.G. Le Clezio

The desert is so vast that no one can know it all. Men go out into the desert, and they are like ships at sea; no one knows when they will return. — J.M.G. Le Clezio

When I was a child, I grew up speaking French, I mean, in a French public school. So my first contact with literature was in French, and that's the reason why I write in French. — J.M.G. Le Clezio

A writer is not a prophet, is not a philosopher; he's just someone who is witness to what is around him. And so writing is a way to ... it's the best way to testify, to be a witness. — J.M.G. Le Clezio

I had never felt like that before, as if there were a sort of curse, a merciless force in the light that shone on a world where life is borken and lost, where each new day takes something from the day that precedes it, where suffering is inmovable ... — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

Most people don't know how to ask the right questions. Mondo knew how to ask questions, just at the right time, when you weren't expecting it. People paused for a few seconds, they stopped thinking about themselves and their own business, they thought, and their eyes seemed to blur, because they remembered asking those questions themselves, long ago. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

Thinking! Thinking! The process should no longer be merely this feeble flurry of hailstones that raises a little dust. It should be something quite different. Thinking should be a terrifying process. When the earth thinks, whole towns crumble to the ground and thousands of people die.
Thinking: raising boulders, hollowing out valleys, preparing tidal waves at sea. Thinking like a town: that's to say: eight million inhabitants, twelve million rats, nine million pints of carbon dioxide, two billion tons. Grey light. Cathedral of light. Din. Sudden flashes. Low-lying blanket of black cloud. Flat roofs. Fire alarms. Elevators. Streets. Eighteen thousand miles of streets. 145 million electric light bulbs. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

We know of no other event like it in the history of the world, except perhaps the first confrontation in Europe between the neolithic peoples who came from the East and the primitive hunters. But no witness ever wrote of that great drama. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

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. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

There is no such thing as self-awareness. Imagine thought retreating into itself to think about itself. It would be easier to imagine a revolver bullet extracting itself from its victim's wound and re-entering the barrel. Yes, it would be easier to imagine the universe's explosion suddenly halting its outflow of energy, so that the galaxies congeal once more, and the millions of light-years of their flight through space are immediately annulled. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

Horror is not unimaginable, it has neither the face of a monster nor the bat-wings of a demon. It is calm and tranquil, and it is durable, lasting whole days and nights, months; years, perhaps. It is not mortal. It strikes at the eyes, only the eyes. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

I've always felt very much from a mixed culture - mainly English and French, but also Nigerian, Thai, Mexican. Everything's had its influence on me. — J.M.G. Le Clezio

Cold, still, lookin a little uncomfortable in death as if they weren't quite used to it yet. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

I don't have any office; I can write everywhere. So, I put a piece of paper on the table, and then I travel. Literally, writing for me is like travelling. It's getting out of myself and living another life - maybe a better life. — J.M.G. Le Clezio

Reading is a free practice. I think the readers are free to begin by the books where they want to. They don't have to be led in their reading. — J.M.G. Le Clezio

From that imbalance rose the tragic results of the coming together of two worlds. It was the extermination of an ancient dream by the frenzy of a modern one, the destruction of myths by a desire for power. It was gold, modern weapons, and rational thought pitted against magic and gods: the outcome could not have been otherwise. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

She carried the burn of the sun on her body. It was for all of those wasted, dull years. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

I grew up in a Mauritian bubble in France ... I had the feeling of not belonging, but still living with French culture. — J.M.G. Le Clezio

You don't mean to say that Hogan has turned into a woman? Why, yes, that's him all right, you can recognize him by the fact that he has two legs, two arms, and an indecipherable face. Man, woman, what difference does it make? Are they not all exactly the same, these little black insects with their rhythmic movements, the same eyes, the same thoughts? — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

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. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

Real lives have no end. Real books have no end. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

If you really want to know, I'd rather not have been born at all. I find life very tiring. The thing's done now, of course, and I can't alter it. But there will always be this regret at the back of my mind, I shall never quite be able to get rid of it, and it will spoil everything. The thing to do now is to grow old quickly, to eat up the years as fast as possible, looking neither right nor left. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

Abruptly, with the shock of the Conquest, the sober and puritanical man of the Christian Inquisition encountered, through their violent and upsetting nature, peoples who through their rituals were identified with the gods. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

I enjoy very much being in a foreign country, in a new country, new place. And I enjoy also beginning a new book. It's like being someone else. — J.M.G. Le Clezio

To understand the hidden secret of the modern industrial world in which I find myself, I have to return to another world. That world is at once wartime Nice and the plantation - the sugar isles on which Europe's prosperity was built. — J.M.G. Le Clezio

It is, I believe, the primary charm of poetry to give the lesson of mirage, that is, to show the fragile and vibrant movement of creation, in which the word is in a certain way human quintessence, prayer. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

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. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

It was as if there were no names here, as if there were no words. The desert cleansed everything in its wind, wiped everything away. The men had the freedom of the open spaces in their eyes, their skin was like metal. Sunlight blazed everywhere. The ochre, yellow, gray, white sand, the fine sand shifted, showing the direction of the wind. It covered all traces, all bones. It repelled light, drove away water, life, far from a center that no one could recognize. The men knew perfectly well that the desert wanted nothing to do with them: so they walked on without stopping, following the paths that other feet had already traveled in search of something else. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

The writer, the poet, the novelist, are all creators. This does not mean that they invent language; it means that they use language to create beauty, ideas, images. This is why we cannot do without them. — J.M.G. Le Clezio

[M]ay not literature (and, in particular, fiction) be considered a desperate and permanently thwarted effort to produce a unique form of expression? Something like a cry, perhaps, a cry that, somehow, inexplicably contains all the millions of words that have ever existed, anywhere, in any age. In contrast with the spoken word and its classifying function, the purpose of writing seems, rather, to be a quest for the egg, the seed, nothing more. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

To act: that is what the writer would like to be able to do, above all. To act, rather than to bear witness. To write, imagine, and dream in such a way that his words and inventions and dreams will have an impact upon reality, will change people's minds and hearts, will prepare the way for a better world. — J.M.G. Le Clezio