Toute grande oeuvre est soit une Iliade soit une Odysée, les odysées étant beaucoup plus nombreuse que les iliades: le Satiricon, La Divine Comédie, Pantagruel, Don Quichotte, et naturellement Ulysse (où l’on reconnaît d’ailleurs l’influence...

After the magical act accomplished by Joyce with Ulysses, perhaps we are getting away from it.

We have gotten away from this double aspect of either putting the character back into historical events or of making a historical event of his very life.

– Cinque franchi, cento soldi, quelli che ti darò, proprio qui: cinque franchi dei miei che ho guadagnato con la mia frutta e verdura sant’Antonio da Padova, se quest’anno i parigini tornano come gli anni...

All confessions are Odysseys.

When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn’t interested any longer. That’s very astonishing.

He sought an adventure but didn’t find one. He was inexperienced and besides he didn’t have too much imagination.

All societies are historical.

Ulysses finds himself unchanged, aside from his experience, at the end of his odyssey.

We have come from all the countries of the world and are going to Saintes-Maries de la Mer. Nomads of the enigma, we gather there each year after having carried our mystery through ordinary countryside...

Fiction has consisted either of placing imaginary characters in a true story, which is the Iliad, or of presenting the story of an individual as having a general historical value, which is the Odyssey.

It doesn’t seem to me that anyone has discovered much that’s new since the Iliad or the Odyssey.

His thoughts were hemmed in. One can only draw curved lines on the terrestrial sphere which, as they extend, forever meet with themselves. At such intersections we always encounter what we have already seen.

It is the creator of fiction’s point of view; it is the character who interests him. Sometimes he wants to convince the reader that the story he is telling is as interesting as universal history.

To have one’s own story told by a third party who doesn’t know that the character in question is himself the hero of the story being told, that’s a technical refinement.

– Tonton Gabriel, dit Zazie paisiblement, tu m’as pas encore espliqué si tu étais un hormosessuel ou pas, primo, et deuzio où t’avais été pêcher toutes les belles choses en langue forestière que tu dégoisais...

It seems to me that an author who has determined very new domains in literature is Gertrude Stein.

We think of giving importance to history, but it is the individual who is interesting, and we want to give him a historical importance.

Mais Turandot sort brusquement de son bistrot et, du bas des marches, il lui crie : “Eh petite, où vas-tu comme ça ?” Zazie ne lui rèpond pas, elle se contente d’allonger le pas.

Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything.

In the Odyssey, there are technical refinements which are extremely remarkable, and I’m surprised they aren’t mentioned more often.

The Iliad is the private lives of people thrown into disorder by history.

One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey.

The Odyssey is the story of Americans up to the point where they are well-established, and even so it is detached from the historical side.

Religions tend to disappear with man’s good fortune

The Odyssey is the story of someone who, in the course of diverse experiences, acquires a personality or affirms and recovers his personality.

A very great Iliad… concerns the creation of a nation.

There have been only rare moments in history where individual histories were able to run their course without wars or revolutions.