18 Quotes by J. M. G. Le Clézio

The shadows of the hills and rocks grew long in the valley bottom. But the guide didn’t seem to notice. Sitting very still, his back leaning against the wall of the tomb, he had no sense of the passing day, or hunger, or thirst. He was filled with a different force, from a different time that had made him a stranger to the order of man. Perhaps he was no longer waiting for anything, no longer knew anything, and now he resembled the desert – silence, stillness, absence.

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.

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.

I grew up in a Mauritian bubble in France... I had the feeling of not belonging, but still living with French culture.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.