J. M. G. Le Clezio quote: "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."

Reading is a free practice. I think the readers are free to begin by the books where they want to. T...
J. M. G. LE CLEZIO

The novelist, he's not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He's someone who ...
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 aro...
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 us...
J. M. G. LE CLEZIO

I have the feeling of being a very small item on this planet, and literature enables me to express t...
J. M. G. LE CLEZIO

The writer, the poet, the novelist, are all creators. This does not mean that they invent language; ...
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 contac...
J. M. G. LE CLEZIO

My English is closer to the literary English, and I'm not very familiar with jokes in English or...
J. M. G. LE CLEZIO

I grew up in a Mauritian bubble in France... I had the feeling of not belonging, but still living wi...
J. M. G. LE CLEZIO

I've always felt very much from a mixed culture - mainly English and French, but also Nigerian, ...
J. M. G. LE CLEZIO

I don't have any office; I can write everywhere. So, I put a piece of paper on the table, and th...
J. M. G. LE CLEZIO

To understand the hidden secret of the modern industrial world in which I find myself, I have to ret...
J. M. G. LE CLEZIO

If I examine the circumstances which inspired me to write - and this is not mere self-indulgence, bu...
J. M. G. LE CLEZIO

Language is the most extraordinary invention in the history of humanity, the one which came before e...
J. M. 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 ...
J. M. G. LE CLEZIO

I enjoy very much being in a foreign country, in a new country, new place. And I enjoy also beginnin...
J. M. G. LE CLEZIO

Village cricket spread fast through the land.
G. M. TREVELYAN

If the French noblesse had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants, their chateaux would...
G. M. TREVELYAN

Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.
G. M. TREVELYAN

The best job goes to the person who can get it done without passing the buck or coming back with exc...
G. M. TREVELYAN

A little man often cast a long shadow.
G. M. TREVELYAN

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth rea...
G. M. TREVELYAN

Socrates gave no diplomas or degrees, and would have subjected any disciple who demanded one to a di...
G. M. TREVELYAN

Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization.
G. M. TREVELYAN

One only needs two tools in life: WD-40 to make things go, and duct tape to make them stop.
G. M. WEILACHER

Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.
G. M. TREVELYAN

Education has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth readin...
G. M. TREVELYAN

Anger is a momentary madness, so control your passion or it will control you.
G. M. TREVELYAN

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth rea...
G. M. TREVELYAN

Never tell a young person that anything cannot be done. God may have been waiting centuries for some...
G. M. TREVELYAN

One only needs two tools in life: WD-40 to make things go, and duct tape to make them stop.
G. M. WEILACHER

Looking at the proliferation of personal web pages on the net, it looks like very soon everyone on e...
M. G. SIRIAM

I have two doctors - my left leg and my right leg
G. M. TREVELYAN

One half who graduate from college never read another book.
G. M. TREVELYAN

The dead were and are not. Their place knows them no more and is ours today... The poetry of history...
G. M. TREVELYAN

I ever will profess myself the greatest friend to those whose actions best correspond with their doc...
J. G. STEDMAN

Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.
J. G. STEDMAN

During the crusades all were religious mad, and now all are mad for want of it.
J. G. STEDMAN

I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everyt...
J. G. BALLARD

If you're against globalisation, it doesn't achieve much by sort of bombing the head offices...
J. G. BALLARD

To my child's eyes, which had seen nothing else, Shanghai was a waking dream where everything I ...
J. G. BALLARD

Presumably all obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born. That whole private mythology, in...
J. G. BALLARD

People think that by living on some mountainside in a tent and being frozen to death by freezing rai...
J. G. BALLARD

I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, all writers would find...
J. G. BALLARD

In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom.
J. G. BALLARD

I've decided to recast myself as Utopian. I like this landscape of the M25 and Heathrow. I like ...
J. G. BALLARD

The future is going to be boring. The suburbanisation of the planet will continue, and the suburbani...
J. G. BALLARD

There are signs, I think, that people aren't satisfied by consumerism: that people resent the fa...
J. G. BALLARD

No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Hemingway&#...
J. G. BALLARD

Consumerism is so weird. It's a sort of conspiracy we collude in. You'd think shoppers spend...
J. G. BALLARD

The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we're sane and r...
J. G. BALLARD

I admired anyone who could unsettle people.
J. G. BALLARD

Orwell's '1984' convinced me, rightly or wrongly, that Marxism was only a quantum leap a...
J. G. BALLARD

The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strang...
J. G. BALLARD

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not nee...
J. G. BALLARD

Once in motion, a pattern tends to stay in motion.
J. G. GALLIMORE

Your self image is your pattern!. Every thought has an activity visualized. Every activity belongs t...
J. G. GALLIMORE

We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind -- mass merchandising, advertising, politics cond...
J. G. BALLARD

I believe that organic sex, body against body, skin area against skin area, is becoming no longer po...
J. G. BALLARD

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprun...
J. G. BALLARD

Sleep is an eight-hour peep show of infantile erotica.
J. G. BALLARD

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need ...
J. G. BALLARD

A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.
J. G. BALLARD

He always looked forward to the evening drives through the centre of Shanghai, this electric and lur...
J. G. BALLARD

People nowadays like to be together not in the old-fashioned way of, say, mingling on the piazza of ...
J. G. BALLARD

Perhaps violence, like pornography, is some kind of an evolutionary standby system, a last-resort de...
J. G. BALLARD

In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom!
J. G. BALLARD

Image creates desire. You will what you imagine.
J. G. GALLIMORE

A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, ...
J. G. BALLARD

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is l...
J. G. BALLARD

I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything...
J. G. BALLARD

Hell is out of fashion -- institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th centur...
J. G. BALLARD

Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in whi...
J. G. BALLARD

The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its passing, for as a basicall...
J. G. BALLARD

What our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in c...
J. G. BALLARD

I thought it was a wonderfully conceptual act actually, to fire a replica pistol at a figurehead -- ...
J. G. BALLARD

The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its...
J. G. BALLARD

Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of r...
J. G. BALLARD

The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever...
J. G. BALLARD

A cynic is just a man who found out when he was ten that there wasn't any Santa Claus, and he's stil...
J. G. COZZENS

God gives every bird its food, but He does not throw it into its nest.
J. G. HOLLAND

I was born in the city's general hospital on November 15, 1930, and we lived at 31 Amherst Avenu...
J. G. BALLARD

I made a very slatternly mother, notably unkeen on housework, unaware that homes need to be cleaned ...
J. G. BALLARD

Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in...
J. G. BALLARD

I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are large...
J. G. BALLARD

I take for granted that for the imaginative writer, the exercise of the imagination is part of the b...
J. G. BALLARD

I only realised why I keep living in Shepperton when I returned to China. All the people who moved t...
J. G. BALLARD

Medicine was certainly intended to be a career. I wanted to become a psychiatrist, an adolescent amb...
J. G. BALLARD

In March 1943, my parents, four-year-old sister and I were interned with other foreign civilians at ...
J. G. BALLARD

At the school I attended, the clergyman who ran the cathedral school in Shanghai would give lines to...
J. G. BALLARD

Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static bac...
J. G. BALLARD

The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its...
J. G. BALLARD

Even one's own home is a kind of anthology of advertisers, manufacturers, motifs and presentatio...
J. G. BALLARD

My room is dominated by the huge painting, which is a copy of 'The Violation' by the Belgian...
J. G. BALLARD

There is no great achievement that is not the result of patient working and waiting.
J. G. HOLLAND

I had a very mixed kind of childhood reading. I read the childhood classics like 'Robinson Cruso...
J. G. BALLARD

One of the things I took from my wartime experiences was that reality was a stage set... the comfort...
J. G. BALLARD

Novelists should be like scientists, dissecting the cadaver.
J. G. BALLARD

A reality that is electronic... Once everybody's got a computer terminal in their home, to satis...
J. G. BALLARD

When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baude...
J. G. BALLARD

A man may carry the whole scheme of Christian truth in his mind from boyhood to old age without the ...
J. G. HOLLAND

There is no great achievement that is not the result of patient working and waiting.
J. G. HOLLAND

I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everythin...
J. G. BALLARD

Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent worl...
J. G. BALLARD

An arts degree is like a diploma in origami. And about as much use.
J. G. BALLARD

I've seen descriptions of advanced TV systems in which a simulation of reality is computer-contr...
J. G. BALLARD

The geometry of landscape and situation seems to create its own systems of time, the sense of a dyna...
J. G. BALLARD

I find it quite funny—no, hilarious—that despite my deep hatred for myself, if ever given the ch...
J. "CYLO" G.

I think of science fiction as being part of the great river of imaginative fiction that has flowed t...
J. G. BALLARD

Boredom is a fearsome prospect. There's a limit to the number of cars and microwaves you can buy...
J. G. BALLARD

I don't think any particular painters have inspired me, except in a general sense. It was more a...
J. G. BALLARD

There were no museums or galleries in Shanghai, but I was very keen on art - I was always sketching ...
J. G. BALLARD

The dream of empire died when Shanghai surrendered without a fight. Even at the age of 11 or 12, I k...
J. G. BALLARD

My father worked, and my mother played bridge. Every time I went out of the house, I was chauffeur-d...
J. G. BALLARD

Looking back, it puzzles me that my parents decided to stay in Shanghai when they must have known th...
J. G. BALLARD

While reality and imagination is truth, everything and nothing is reality, for truth is merely imagi...
J. "CYLO" G.

I came to live in Shepperton in 1960. I thought: the future isn't in the metropolitan areas of L...
J. G. BALLARD

I thought it was a wonderfully conceptual act actually, to fire a replica pistol at a figurehead - t...
J. G. BALLARD

Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.
J. G. BALLARD

The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its passing, for as a basicall...
J. G. BALLARD

The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its...
J. G. BALLARD

The superiority complex of humans is astonishing. We always speak of other animals as if we were not...
J. "CYLO" G.

I would say that I quite consciously rely on my obsessions in all my work, that I deliberately set u...
J. G. BALLARD

The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early r...
J. G. BALLARD

Justice is merely vengeance in disguise.
J. "CYLO" G.

Medicine was certainly intended to be a career. I wanted to become a psychiatrist, an adolescent amb...
J. G. BALLARD

Death is our savior from life.
J. "CYLO" G.

The entertainment medium of film is particularly tuned to the present imaginations of people at larg...
J. G. BALLARD

I sometimes wonder if I am mad, but then I wonder what it means to be mad. I mean, can you truly say...
J. "CYLO" G.

The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a va...
J. G. BALLARD

I would love to have been a painter in the tradition of the surrealist painters who I admire so much...
J. G. BALLARD

My upbringing was so middle-class and repressed. It wasn't until I was placed in Lunghua that I ...
J. G. BALLARD

There are some people, who place enormous value on their home and feel that it defines them, that a ...
J. G. BALLARD

The heart is wiser than the intellect.
J. G. HOLLAND

There is no royal road to anything. One thing at a time, and all things in succession. That which gr...
J. G. HOLLAND

E. Klimov's 'Come and See,' about partisans fighting the Germans in Byelorussia, is the ...
J. G. BALLARD

I was terribly wounded by my wife's death.
J. G. BALLARD

Yes, sometimes I think that all my writing is nothing more than the compensatory work of a frustrate...
J. G. BALLARD

Nearly everywhere monarchs raised themselves further above the level of the greatest nobles and butt...
J. M. ROBERTS

There were theoretical elements in the subjection of women and it is not possible to avoid the concl...
J. M. ROBERTS

The Romans had been able to post their laws on boards in public places, confidant that enough litera...
J. M. ROBERTS

Imperialism was genuinely popular among Athenians who would expect to share in its profits, even if ...
J. M. ROBERTS

Overall, the anarchy was the most creative of all periods of Japanese culture for in it there appear...
J. M. ROBERTS

There was an ingredient used in perfumes and remedies in the Middle Ages called 'momie' that...
M. J. ROSE

Vera Caspary wrote thrillers - but not like any other author of her time, male or female. Her specia...
M. J. ROSE

Don't use your advance to buy an antique sports car, diamonds by the yard, or a bottle of wine f...
M. J. ROSE

Social media buzz can lead to huge successes when people spread the word about something they love a...
M. J. ROSE

PR and marketing doesn't sell books. It gets attention for them. It sends readers to bookstores ...
M. J. ROSE

I'm realistic about my career as a novelist. I'm certainly not a superstar and far, far from...
M. J. ROSE

All the marketing and advertising sells the book as what it is and hopes that the book will be displ...
M. J. ROSE

An author's ability to bring a marketing synopsis to the table - along with a great manuscript -...
M. J. ROSE

The one thing I am now sure of is that if there is such a thing as destiny, it is a result of our pa...
M. J. ROSE

The most satisfying thrillers send ordinary people into battle against the forces of evil - otherwis...
M. J. ROSE

It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking our careers will come to a standstill, or worse, cra...
M. J. ROSE

You shouldn't talk about yourself all the time - most of us aren't for sale. Our books are. ...
M. J. ROSE

We need to write books that publicists and marketers and booksellers and book club leaders and libra...
M. J. ROSE

Don't add people to your subscriber list just because they once wrote you a note. Or once answer...
M. J. ROSE

A curious mind is the most important attribute any man or woman can possess.
M. J. ROSE

I might have created the phrase 'memory tools', but people have always found talismans to he...
M. J. ROSE

I think that we need to live our lives for the present... as if it is our one and only wild and wond...
M. J. ROSE

I always miss my mom. Mother's Day would be just one more day I'd feel her absence but for t...
M. J. ROSE

Sales don't always have anything to do with good or brilliant or original. Sales are about appea...
M. J. ROSE

Ask your editor or ask your agent to find out what the house's goals are for your book before it...
M. J. ROSE

A mystery is a whodunit. You know what happened, but not how or who's behind it. A thriller, or ...
M. J. ROSE

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made...
J. M. SYNGE

Before MS moved in on me, I'd worked for seven years as a city lawyer, as the editor of a litera...
M. J. HYLAND

Lebanon, Israel, Ireland, South Africa - wherever there is a bleeding sore on the body of the world,...
J. M. COETZEE

The grief of the keen is no personal complaint for the death of one woman over eighty years, but see...
J. M. SYNGE

Lord, confound this surly sister, blight her brow with blotch and blister, cramp her larynx, lung an...
J. M. SYNGE

In the middle classes the gifted son of a family is always the poorest -- usually a writer or artist...
J. M. SYNGE

I'm a good scholar when it comes to reading but a blotting kind of writer when you give me a pen.
J. M. SYNGE

If you want to make your dreams come true, the first thing you have to do is wake up.
J. M. POWER

I was taught to think outside the box. Before my grandfather was one of the original Mad Men, he and...
M. J. ROSE

I know some authors who have gotten $25,000 advances and put it all into marketing, others who alloc...
M. J. ROSE

I think Paris smells not just sweet but melancholy and curious, sometimes sad but always enticing an...
M. J. ROSE

There is no debate that social media is a great tool for networking with others in our industry. It ...
M. J. ROSE

Life is ruthless, and its bestowal of fortune arbitrary and capricious. I'd been born to morons,...
M. J. HYLAND

Buy other authors' books when you go to their events. Even if you aren't going to read it. E...
M. J. ROSE

In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, b...
J. M. COETZEE

I have favorite authors from a lifetime of reading, so there are some I'll automatically read ev...
M. J. ROSE

As for September 11, let us not too easily grant the Americans possession of that date on the calend...
J. M. COETZEE

God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.
J M BARRIE

The most important of all rights is the right to life, and I cannot foresee a day when domesticated ...
J. M. COETZEE

Back in 1999 and 2000, a few of us... a very few of us... Douglas Clegg, Seth Godin and I... offered...
M. J. ROSE

My response, a dubious and hesitant one, is that it has been and may continue to be, in the time tha...
J. M. COETZEE

The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, e...
J. M. COETZEE

In a good play every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or apple.
J. M. SYNGE

The biggest mistake is to assume that another writer's successful strategy will work for you, to...
M. J. ROSE

Thriller novelists get asked - berated, sometimes - about whether their work glorifies bad behavior,...
M. J. ROSE

I grew up in New York and have lived here all my life. I think it's the best city in the world a...
M. J. ROSE

When writers stop to sharpen pencils or get up and make coffee to procrastinate, they still stay in ...
M. J. ROSE

I've always been fascinated by the concept of reincarnation. I learned that many brilliant peopl...
M. J. ROSE

In becoming a citizen, one undertakes certain duties and responsibilities. One of the more intangibl...
J. M. COETZEE

I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.
J. M. COETZEE

Strictly speaking, my interest is not in legal rights for animals but in a change of heart towards a...
J. M. COETZEE

The mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness.
J. M. COETZEE

Find out if your radio interviewer has read your book, or you are going to have to do that part of t...
M. J. ROSE

It's been more than a decade since I put that self-published novel, 'Lip Service', up on...
M. J. ROSE

MWA and The Author's Guild refused to accept me as a member.
M. J. ROSE

From the very beginning, I envisioned success as selling enough books so I could keep getting publis...
M. J. ROSE

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

Share:

Related

More J. M. G. Le Clezio