Great Throughts Treasury

"Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him."

"A writer’s subconscious is one of the filthiest places there are: as a matter of fact, you can find the whole world there."

"Disease-carrying thoughts swarm and multiply in the dark and twisted labyrinths of our minds, and all that is needed is a mob and a good political slogan for the epidemic to be spread once again, with a burst of automatic weapons or a mushroom cloud."

"During the war he was an airman and slaughtered civilians from on high."

"I sat day after day in my little room, waiting for inspiration to visit me, trying to invent a pseudonym that would express, in a combination of noble and striking sounds, our dream of artistic achievement, a pen name grand enough to compensate for my own feeling of insecurity and helplessness at the idea of everything my mother expected from me."

"I see History as a relay race in which one of us, before dropping in his tracks, must carry one stage further the challenge of being a man."

"If there is something that opens horizons, it is precisely ignorance."

"Literature is greater than any of us, dammit."

"Printing mistakes adds value because of the probability calculus, which makes their intrusion into something problematic and almost impossible, even when everything's conceived, precisely, to avoid the intrusion of human error"

"Should you break up the stones that bring this vision to the future and know that little thing of the past stay there."

"Reality is not an inspiration for literature. At its best, literature is an inspiration for reality."

"Sometimes I have the feeling that we live in a dubbed movie and everybody moves their lips but the voices don't correspond. We are all post-synchronized and sometimes is very accomplished and looks natural."

"The gossip that came back to me from fashionable dinners where people pitied poor Romain Gary, who must be a little sad, a little jealous of the meteoric rise in the literary firmament of his cousin Emile Ajar"

"There is more to Jewish history than Auschwitz."

"The avantgarde are people who don't exactly know where they want to go, but are the first to get there."

"When a war is won, it's the losers, not the winners, who are liberated."

"They thought I suffered from lack of exterior, when I suffered from excess of interior."

"The bombs I dropped on Germany between 1940 and 1944 maybe killed a Rilke or a Goethe or a H”lderin in his cradle. And yes, of course, if it had to be done over, I would do it again. Hitler had condemned us to kill. Not even the most just causes are ever innocent."

"Gari in Russian means "burn!"? I want to test myself, a trial by fire, so that my I is burned off."