Georges Perec Quotes

#1. I would say that Edgar Allan Poe, [Georges] Perec, Thomas Pynchon, and [Jorge Luis] Borges are all boy-writers. These are writers who take ... a kind of demonic joy in writing.

Paul Auster

#2. To write: to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.

Georges Perec

#3. What a marvellous invention man is! He can blow on his hands to warm them up, and blow on his soup to cool it down.

Georges Perec

#4. Question your tea spoons.

Georges Perec

#5. A samurai will use a toothpick even though he has not eaten. Inside the skin of a dog, outside the hide of a tiger.

Yamamoto Tsunetomo

#6. Let the teachers teach English and I will teach baseball. There is a lot of people in the United States who say isn't, and they ain't eating.

Dizzy Dean

#7. I don't want a lot of bureaucracy ... I want to run state government the same way we run a campaign - efficient, effective and victorious.

Charlie Crist

#8. What they liked in things they called luxury was only the money behind them; they loved wealth before they loved life.

Georges Perec

#9. First of all, as a man the most important thing you have in your life now is your child that you're carrying. That's it. Everything else comes second; personally, for me, other than your relationship with God and your wife.

Allan Houston

#10. Chess is a fathead and feudal game.

Georges Perec

#11. As soon as you close your eyes, the adventure of sleep begins."

-from "A Man Asleep

Georges Perec

#12. The idea occurred to him when he was twenty. At first it was only a vague idea, a question looming - what should I do? - with an answer taking shape: nothing.

Georges Perec

#13. A gap will yawn, achingly, day by day, it will turn into a colossal pit, an abyss without foundation, a gradual invasion of words by margins, blank and insignificant, so that all of us, to a man, will find nothing to say.

Georges Perec

#14. I have neither one nor the other, and that has been going on for so long now that I have stopped wondering whether it is hate or love which gives us the strength to continue this life of lies, which provides the formidable energy that allows us to go on suffering, and hoping.

Georges Perec

#15. Even in the business of corporations honesty is the best policy, and the companies that have acted in accordance with the highest standard, other things being equal, have reaped the richest harvest.

Robert Green Ingersoll

#16. The actual organization of behavior goes on the level of the individual nerve cells and their connections, and we have a hundred billion nerve cells, probably a hundred trillion connections. It's just mind-boggling to think of all the different ways in which they're arranged in a baby's head.

Steven Pinker

#17. Time is of the essence and I don't have much essence left.

Graham Hill

#18. It seems we only sleep well in our own bed.

Georges Perec

#19. Above all, they had the cinema. And this was probably the only area where they had learned everything from their own sensibilities.

Georges Perec

#20. Despite the Saint-Nectaire, this analysis would be absolutely reasonable if it did not sin grievously by omission

Georges Perec

#21. Because I am well read, I know what a terrible cliche it is to shout, "I *hate* you. I never *asked* to be born," so I refrain.

Caitlin Moran

#22. why count the buses? probably because they're recognizable and regular:they cut up time, they punctuate the background noise; ultimately, they're foreseeable

Georges Perec

#23. I'm happy for the kid and everything, but how the fuck does Lio get a friend before me? I live here.
'I told you I could do it ' Lio IMs me. I want to rip out that smiley's eyes.

Hannah Moskowitz

#24. It is on a day like this one,
a little later a little earlier
that you descover without surprise
that something is wrong
that you don't know how to live
and you will never know

Georges Perec

#25. Every library answers a twofold need, which is often also a twofold obsession: that of conserving certain objects (books) and that of organizing them in certain ways

Georges Perec