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"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."
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"Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very modern anger against anti-Semitism."
"The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, and cry for people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong."
"I love stories that suck you in, that you can't stop reading because you are quite simply there."
"It was pretty silly quoting poetry around free and easy like that. It was the act of a silly damn snob. Give man a few lines of verse and he thinks he's the Lord of all Creation. You think you can walk on water with all your books. Well, the world can get by just fine without them."
"Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I've never led an army, I am a wanderer. I cradle 'The Odyssey' nights while the moon is waning, as if it were the sweet body of a woman."
"For several years, while I searched for, found, and studied black women writers, I deliberately shut O'Connor out, feeling almost ashamed that she had reached me first. And yet, even when I no longer read her, I missed her, and realized that though the rest of America might not mind, having endured it so long, I would never be satisfied with a segregated literature. I would have to read Zora Hurston and Flannery O'Connor, Nella Larsen and Carson McCullers, Jean Toomer and William Faulkner, before I could begin to feel well read at all."
"In reading we have to allow the sunken meanings to remain sunken, suggested, not stated; lapsing and flowing into each other like reeds on the bed of a river."
"And please, stay away from those books you devour. They are putting the most fantastical tales into your head."
"Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practise because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them? I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards, their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble, the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading."
Explore more quotes by Nathalie Sarraute
"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."
"I don't admire Freud as much as some people do. Imagine Shakespeare being aware of the Oedipal complex when he wrote Hamlet. It would have been a disaster."
"The reader has to be creative when he's reading. He has to try to make the thing alive. A good reader has to do a certain amount of work when he is reading."
"Suspicion is one of the morbid reactions by which an organism defends itself and seeks another equilibrium."
"One can't write without having read - you have to read before beginning to write - and universities offer a very good opportunity to read."
"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."
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