Raymond Queneau Quotes

• After the magical act accomplished by Joyce with Ulysses, perhaps we are getting away from it.

  Raymond Queneau

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Magical, Away, Act

• The Odyssey is the story of Americans up to the point where they are well-established, and even so it is detached from the historical side.

  Raymond Queneau

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Point, American

• All confessions are Odysseys.

  Raymond Queneau

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Confession

• 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.

  Raymond Queneau

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Interested, Poet, Identity, Longer

• It seems to me that an author who has determined very new domains in literature is Gertrude Stein.

  Raymond Queneau

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Seems, Literature

• Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything.

  Raymond Queneau

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Precise, Character, Sometimes, Place, Interest, Important

• 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.

  Raymond Queneau

  Topics in History

  Tags in Creator, Interests, Character, Sometimes

• The Odyssey is the story of someone who, in the course of diverse experiences, acquires a personality or affirms and recovers his personality.

  Raymond Queneau

  Topics in Experience

  Tags in Personality

• Religions tend to disappear with man’s good fortune.

  Raymond Queneau

  Topics in Religion

  Tags in Good, Disappear, Fortune

• The Iliad is the private lives of people thrown into disorder by history.

  Raymond Queneau

  Topics in History

  Tags in People, Private

• There have been only rare moments in history where individual histories were able to run their course without wars or revolutions.

  Raymond Queneau

  Topics in History

  Tags in Revolution, Individual, War, Moments

• It doesn’t seem to me that anyone has discovered much that’s new since the Iliad or the Odyssey.

  Raymond Queneau

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Discovered, Seem

• Fiction has consisted either of placing imaginary characters in a true story, which is the Iliad, or of presenting the story of an individual as having a general historical value, which is the Odyssey.

  Raymond Queneau

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in General, Character

• We have gotten away from this double aspect of either putting the character back into historical events or of making a historical event of his very life.

  Raymond Queneau

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Character

• To have one’s own story told by a third party who doesn’t know that the character in question is himself the hero of the story being told, that’s a technical refinement.

  Raymond Queneau

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Character

• A very great Iliad… concerns the creation of a nation.

  Raymond Queneau

  Topics in Creation

  Tags in Great

• Ulysses finds himself unchanged, aside from his experience, at the end of his odyssey.

  Raymond Queneau

  Topics in Experience

• One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey.

  Raymond Queneau

  Topics in Work

• All societies are historical.

  Raymond Queneau

  Topics in Society

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

  Raymond Queneau

  Topics in Work

Raymond Queneau (20)

Birth:	21st February, 1903
Death:	25th October, 1976
Nationality:	French
Profession:	Novelist, Poet

About

Raymond Queneau was a French novelist, poet and the co-founder of Ouvroir de littérature potentielle. Born in Le Havre, Seine-Maritime, Queneau was the only child of Auguste Queneau and Joséphine Mignot. He received his first baccalauréat in 1919 for Latin and Greek, and a second in 1920 for philosophy, then studied at the Sorbonne where he was a fair student of both letters and mathematics, graduating with certificates in philosophy and psychology.

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Today's Anniversary - 18th April

Births

• 1941 - Michael D. Higgins
• 1927 - Samuel P Huntington
• 1882 - Leopold Stokowski
• 1922 - Nigel Kneale
• 1951 - Pierre Pettigrew

Deaths

• 1963 - Margaret Sackville
• 1888 - Roscoe Conkling
• 1955 - Eugen Herrigel
• 2002 - Thor Heyerdahl
• 1964 - Ben Hecht