ROMAIN GARY

When a war is won, it's the losers, not the winners, who are liberated.

'Gari' in Russian means "burn!"... I want to test myself, a trial by fire, so that my 'I' is burned off.

The avantgarde are people who don't exactly know where they want to go, but are the first to get there.

There is more to Jewish history than Auschwitz.

I've had a lot of fun. Good-bye, and thank you.

A writer's subconscious is one of the filthiest places there are: as a matter of fact, you can find the whole world there.

Disease-carrying thoughts swarm and multiply in the dark and twisted labyrinths of our minds, and all that is needed is a mob and a good political slogan for the epidemic to be spread once again, with a burst of automatic weapons or a mushroom cloud.

With maternal love, life makes a promise at dawn that it can never hold. You are forced to eat cold food until your days end. After that, each time a woman holds you in her arms and against her chest, these are merely condolences. You always come back to yell at your mother's grave like an abandoned dog. Never again, never again, never again.

Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.

I sat day after day in my little room, waiting for inspiration to visit me, trying to invent a pseudonym that would express, in a combination of noble and striking sounds, our dream of artistic achievement, a pen name grand enough to compensate for my own feeling of insecurity and helplessness at the idea of everything my mother expected from me.

Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.

The avantgarde are people who don't exactly know where they want to go, but are the first to get there.

When a war is won, it's the losers, not the winners, who are liberated.

With maternal love, life makes a promise at dawn that it can never hold. You are forced to eat cold food until your days end. After that, each time a woman holds you in her arms and against her chest, these are merely condolences. You always come back to yell at your mother's grave like an abandoned dog. Never again, never again, never again.

There is more to Jewish history than Auschwitz.

A writer's subconscious is one of the filthiest places there are: as a matter of fact, you can find the whole world there.

I see History as a relay race in which one of us, before dropping in his tracks, must carry one stage further the challenge of being a man.

Disease-carrying thoughts swarm and multiply in the dark and twisted labyrinths of our minds, and all that is needed is a mob and a good political slogan for the epidemic to be spread once again, with a burst of automatic weapons or a mushroom cloud.

I've had a lot of fun. Good-bye, and thank you.

'Gari' in Russian means "burn!"... I want to test myself, a trial by fire, so that my 'I' is burned off.

I sat day after day in my little room, waiting for inspiration to visit me, trying to invent a pseudonym that would express, in a combination of noble and striking sounds, our dream of artistic achievement, a pen name grand enough to compensate for my own feeling of insecurity and helplessness at the idea of everything my mother expected from me.