Nathalie Sarraute Quotes

I think it's very painful, and that it's better not to have any doubts. I envy those who don't have any; I envy them a lot. They are happy people.

Poetry is what makes the invisible appear.

This was what he taught at the Collège de France. And in the entire neighborhood, in all the nearby Faculties, in the literature, law, history and philosophy courses, at the Institute and at the Palais de Justice, in the buses, the métros, in all the government offices, sensible men, normal men, active men, worthy, wholesome, strong men, triumphed.
Avoiding the shops filled with pretty things, the women trotting briskly along, the café waiters, the medical students, the traffic policemen, the clerks from notary offices, Rimbaud or Proust, having been torn from life, cast out from life and deprived of support, were probably wandering aimlessly through the streets, or dozing away, their heads resting on their chests, in some dusty public square.

Literature is always trying to show other parts of this immense universe in which we live. It's endless. I'm sure there will be other writers who will discover new worlds.

I don't for a minute think that Hitler is like Joan of Arc. But I think that at that deep level of tropisms, Hitler or Stalin must have experienced the same tropisms as anyone else.

I have often heard that the novel is dead. But I see novels produced, I don't know how many a week, in France. I have the impression it's carrying along quite well.

The act of writing is a kind of catharsis, a liberation, but I never really concerned myself with that. I write because it interests me.

The novel moves like all the arts. It's transforming itself all the time.

Women have seen that they have locked themselves up with feminist writing.

It's a question of not copying the masters, to look for something, good or bad, for oneself. To enter this liberated state of mind, one cannot copy the others.

Chacun peut e prouver en soi ce double mouvement: de s ir de s'inte grer a' la socie te , besoin de se re aliser par soi-me me en dehors d'elle. We all have this double impulse within ourselves: the desire to integrate into society, and the need to fulfil ourselves outside of it, through our own efforts.

For me, the poetry in a work is that which makes visible the invisible.

All psychological research is completely barred by the interpretations of the psychoanalysts. Everything happens in the unconscious, and I don't know what this unconscious is.

Television has lifted the manufacture of banality out of the sphere of handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry.

I have never sought the reason why I write.

One can't write without having read - you have to read before beginning to write - and universities offer a very good opportunity to read.

She went from room to room, nosed about in the kitchen, banged furiously on the door of the bathroom which someone was occupying, and she wanted to break in, to manage, to give them a shaking, to ask them if they were going to stay in there for an hour, or remind them that it was late, that they were going to miss the car or the train, it was too late, that they had already missed something because of their carelessness, their negligence, or that their breakfast was ready, that it was cold, that it had been waiting for two hours, that it was stone-cold . . . And it seemed that from her viewpoint there was nothing uglier, more contemptible, more stupid, more hateful, that there was no more obvious sign of inferiority, of weakness, than to let one's breakfast grow cold, than to come late for breakfast.

And they talked and talked, repeating the same things, going over them, then going over them again, from one side then from the other, kneading and kneading them, continually rolling between their fingers this unsatisfactory, mean substance that they had extracted from their lives (what they called "life," their domain), kneading it, pulling it, rolling it until it ceased to form anything between their fingers but a little pile, a little gray pellet.

It's the duty of all novelists, all painters, all musicians, all people who try to make art move: to look for something they feel authentically, without paying attention to styles.

Those who live in a world of human beings can only retrace their steps.