54 Quotes by Raymond Queneau

The really inspired person is never inspired: he’s always inspired: he doesn’t go looking for inspiration and he doesn’t get up in arms about artistic technique.

The only advantage he could see in the change was that he had a small desk in his room; his capacity for isolation was thereby increased. But none of this changed his life very much. He continued his games of billiards and his reading. And was periodically overwhelmed by abominable fits of despair from which he was abruptly extricated by a ridiculous but stubborn optimism, an absurd love of life.

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.

Man’s usual routine is to work and to dream and work and dream.

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

Rules cease to exist once they have outlived their value, but forms live on eternally. There are forms of the novel which impose on the suggested topic all the virtues of the Number. Born of the very expression and of the diverse aspects of the tale, connected by nature with the guiding idea, daughter and mother of all the elements that it polarizes, a structure develops, which transmits to the works the last reflections of Universal Light and the last echoes of the Harmony of Worlds.

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.

Spiders’ teeth are not so long as a torment that cannot be avowed.

Religions tend to disappear with man’s good fortune.