J. M. G. Le Clezio Quotes

A writer's work is to witness things.

I think the most important thing when you're telling a story is to just tell the story as best as you possibly can.

I recorded that because it happened to me. I wasn't making a point.

I write in order to bear witness to life.

The impulse to write comes, I think, from a desire - perhaps a need - to give imaginative life to experience, to share it with the reader, not to cover up the truth but to deliver it obliquely.

Just as Renaissance artists provided narratives for the era they lived in, so do I. I'm always looking beyond the surface. I've done that ever since I first picked up a camera.

As writers, it is our job not only to imagine, but to witness.

I don't write about the same thing every time, everyday, different things are happening out there and if you take the time to look around, you can see that, then you can put it all together and tell the story.

The best stories come out of the truth.

What writing does is to reveal.

I tell stories. That's what I do. I've always told stories.

Fiction is the best way I know how to think something through.

Write what you know.

It's not just that reporting gives you a bigger slice of life, gives - lends verisimilitude to what you are doing - it's that it feeds the imagination.

My role is to bear witness and to bring back what people see and tell you.

I see things with my own eyes, just as if they were the first eyes that ever saw, and then I set about to tell, as best I can, just what I've seen.

I'm a writer. My job is to speak what - that which I think is true. If that bridges the gap, that's good. If it doesn't, that's too bad.

I wouldn't be a writer if I couldn't tell the truth.

Be honest about what you see, get out of the way and let the story reveal itself

Any fool may write a most valuable book by chance, if he will only tell us what he heard and saw with veracity.

In order to write about life first you must live it.

I write about what I know, what I live, what I observe.

The conventional wisdom is - people say this all the time - you should only write something when you're far enough away from it that you can have a perspective. But that's not true. That's a story that you're telling. The truth of it is here, right now. It's the only truth that we ever know. And I'm interested in that truth and the confusion being part of the experience and sorting it your way through and figuring it out.

All you can write is what you see.

I think it's very important for writers and artists generally to be witnesses to the world, and to be transparent. To let other people speak... to travel... to experience the world. And memorialize it.