A Quote by J. M. G. Le Clezio

The novelist, he's not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He's someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions.

J. M. G. Le Clezio

Quote Topics

Above Asks Language Novel Novelist Philosopher Questions Someone Spoken Spoken Language Technician Through Writes

Quote Author

J. M. G. Le Clezio
French - Writer
Born: April 13, 1940

The earliest language was body language and, since this language is the language of questions, if we limit the questions, and if we only pay attention to or place values on spoken or written language, then we are ruling out a large area of human language.

Paulo Freire

If someone asks, ‘But what in the end is a philosopher?’ I would say ‘A philosopher is a human being who fights in theory.’

Louis Althusser

We are often taught to look for the beauty in all things, so in finding it, the layman asks the philosopher while the philosopher asks the photographer.

Criss Jami

I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.

Aleksandar Hemon

I am a man and alive. For this reason I am a novelist. And, being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, te scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog....Only in the novel are all things given full play.

D. H. Lawrence

A novelist writes a novel, and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal response, the communal nature of the audience is like having five hundred people read your novel and respond to it at the same time. I find that thrilling.

August Wilson

Well, people have been wondering what's going to happen to the novel for two hundred years; its death has been announced many times. You know, I think the novel keeps redefining the world we live in. What you should look for in a novel is a window nobody else is looking out of, that nobody else can look through. What you look for is a voice. You pick up a novel by someone such as Faulkner or Hemingway and you just read three pages and you know who wrote it. And that's what one should demand of a novelist.

Mordecai Richler

Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question. Social stagnation results not from a lack of answers but from the absence of the impulse to ask questions.

Eric Hoffer

A pipe is a pocket philosopher,--a truer one than Socrates, for it never asks questions. Socrates must have been very tiresome, when one thinks of it.

Ouida

I sometimes feel that my goal as a novelist would be to write a novel in which the language was so transparent that the reader would forget that language was the medium of understanding. Of course that's not possible, but it's some sort of idealized goal.

Paul Auster

it is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do you completely do.

Gertrude Stein

I try to approach the film medium as a novelist and the novel medium as a filmmaker on some level. It's that question: Do we think in pictures, or do we think in language? And the novelist believes one thing, and the filmmaker believes another thing - and I'm fascinated by that balance.

Noah Hawley

I always thought that I could write a novel. In my case, it was misguided. I do believe that the best nonfiction is not "literary journalism," a misleading term, but rather journalism that asks the questions that serious literature asks. It's storytelling that happens to be true. So I don't think it was a missed opportunity. After awhile you learn what you're really good at. Life is short, so spend time doing that.

Ron Rosenbaum

Art is communication spoken by man for humanity in a language raised above the everyday happening.

Mary Wigman

I want to build a reputation as the Treasury Select Committee chairman, as somebody who asks tough questions, listens and looks into what people want us to look into, and asks those questions without fear or favour.