Nathalie Sarraute Quotes

#1. I believe in the country America used to be

Lana Del Rey

#2. 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.

Nathalie Sarraute

#3. 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.

Nathalie Sarraute

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

Nathalie Sarraute

#5. Do you imagine the universe is agitated? Go into the desert at night and look at the stars. This practice should answer the question.

Lao-Tzu

#6. Neither reproaches nor encouragements are able to revive a faith that is waning.

Nathalie Sarraute

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

Nathalie Sarraute

#8. The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it.

Lytton Strachey

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

Nathalie Sarraute

#10. One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.

Nathalie Sarraute

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

Nathalie Sarraute

#12. 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.

Nathalie Sarraute

#13. 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.

Nathalie Sarraute

#14. Le mot 'psychologie'est un de ceux qu'aucun auteur d'aujourd'hui ne peut entendre prononcer a' son sujet sans baisser les yeux et rougir. The word 'psychology' is one that no author today can hear said about her work without lowering her eyes and blushing.

Nathalie Sarraute

#15. He could see what I hadn't until now. She was my weakness and he would exploit it by doing what I could not. He would have her. He would kill her.
But what if I could have her? What if I could make her mine?
Only mine.

Ashlan Thomas

#16. Suspicion is one of the morbid reactions by which an organism defends itself and seeks another equilibrium.

Nathalie Sarraute

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

Nathalie Sarraute

#18. 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.

Nathalie Sarraute

#19. 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.

Nathalie Sarraute

#20. In some ways, I decided, women are showpieces in American society, too.

Malala Yousafzai

#21. Abundance is the ability to do what you need to do, when you need to do it.

Darryl Anka

#22. Poetry is what makes the invisible appear.

Nathalie Sarraute

#23. Hinde Esther Kreitman is a forgotten literary foremother, her works largely lost, ignored and out of print.

Clive Sinclair

#24. 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.

Nathalie Sarraute

#25. I have never sought the reason why I write.

Nathalie Sarraute

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

Nathalie Sarraute

#27. 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.

Nathalie Sarraute

#28. 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.

Nathalie Sarraute

#29. 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.

Nathalie Sarraute

#30. We're swallowed up only when we are willing for it to happen.

Nathalie Sarraute

#31. The forest would be very quiet if only a few birds sang.

Anonymous