playwright, poet, literary critic, diarist, illustrator, graphic artist, film actor, television actor, film director
🔗 Read on Wikipedia1909 – 1994
No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.
Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.
When I was nine, the teacher asked us to write a piece about our village fete. He read mine in class. I was encouraged and continued. I even wanted to write my memoirs at the age of ten. At twelve I wrote poetry, mostly about friendship - 'Ode to Friendship.' Then my class wanted to make a film, and one little boy suggested that I write the script.
A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.
That's not it. That's not it at all. You always have a tendency to add. But one must be able to subtract too. It's not enough to integrate, you must also disintegrate. That's the way life is. That's philosophy. That's science. That's progress, civilization.
There are now many invisible people on stage.
All the plays that have ever been written, from ancient Greece to the present day, have never really been anything but thrillers... Every play's an investigation brought to a successful conclusion.
We are all Victims of Duty.
I didn't mean you were stupid. It's just that you're not logical, which isn't the same thing at all.
Oh words, what crimes are committed in your name!
Every work of art (unless it is a psuedo-intellectualist work, a work already comprised in some ideology that it merely illustrates, as with Brecht) is outside ideology, is not reducible to ideology. Ideology circumscribes without penetrating it. The absence of ideology in a work does not mean an absence of ideas; on the contrary it fertilizes them.
Logician: A cat has four paws. Logician: And the contrary is also true.
Good men make good rhinoceroses, unfortunately.
I have no ideas before I write a play. I have them when I have finished it ... I believe that aritistic creation is spontaneous. It is for me.
I am told, in a dream ... you can only get the answer to all your questions through a dream. So in my dream, I fall asleep, and I dream, in my dream, that I'm having that absolute, revealing dream.
It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
But History was against me. History is right, objectively speaking. I'm just a historical dead end. I hope at least that my fate will serve as an example to you all and to posterity.
It isn't what people think that's important, but the reason they think what they think.
Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I'd be a politician.
Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.
It's not a certain society that seems ridiculous to me, it's mankind.
God is dead. Marx is dead. And I don’t feel so well myself.
Everything that has been will be, everything that will be is, everything that will be has been.
It was quite fashionable to poke fun at Hugo. You remember Gide’s “Victor Hugo is the greatest French poet, alas!” or Cocteau’s “Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.” Anyway, I hated rhetoric and eloquence. I agreed with Verlaine, who said, “You have to get hold of eloquence and twist its neck off!” Nonetheless, it took some courage. Nowadays it is common to debunk great men, but it wasn’t then.
None of us would have written as we do without surrealism and dadaism. By liberating the language, those movements paved the way for us.
Remembrance of Things Past is too long and difficult, and what is interesting is the seventh volume, Time Regained. Otherwise, Proust’s work is concerned with irony, social criticism, worldliness, and the passage of time, which are not my preoccupations.
We exist on several different planes, and when we said nothing had any reason we were referring to the psychological and social plane.
The Pataphysique is not dead. It lives on in the minds of certain men, even if they are not aware of it. It has gone into “occultation,” as we say, and will come back again one day.
The theater chose me. As I said, I started with poetry, and I also wrote criticism and dialogue. But I realized that I was most successful at dialogue. Perhaps I abandoned criticism because I am full of contradictions, and when you write an essay you are not supposed to contradict yourself. But in the theater, by inventing various characters, you can. My characters are contradictory not only in their language, but in their behavior as well.
You can stay in society and be alone, as long as you can be detached from the world. This is why I don’t think I have ever gone for the easy option or done things that were expected of me.
I have never been to the Right, nor have I been a Communist, because I have experienced, personally, both forms of totalitarianism. It is those who have never lived under tyranny who call me petit bourgeois.
People always try to find base motives behind every good action. We are afraid of pure goodness and of pure evil.
I let characters and symbols emerge from me, as if I were dreaming. I always use what remains of my dreams of the night before. Dreams are reality at its most profound, and what you invent is truth because invention, by its nature, can’t be a lie. Writers who try to prove something are unattractive to me, because there is nothing to prove and everything to imagine. So I let words and images emerge from within. If you do that, you might prove something in the process.
I have always regretted having gotten involved with literature up to my neck. I would have preferred to have been a monk; but, as I said, I was torn between wanting fame and wishing to renounce the world. The basic problem is that if God exists, what is the point of literature? And if He doesn’t exist, what is the point of literature? Either way, my writing, the only thing I have ever succeeded in doing, is invalidated.-->
To introduce people to a different world, to encounter the miracle of being, that is important. When I write “The train arrives at the station,” it is banal, but at the same time sensational, because it is invented.
People who don’t read are brutes. It is better to write than to make war, isn’t it?
My work has been essentially a dialogue with death, asking him, “Why? Why?” So only death can silence me. Only death can close my lips.
Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.