Raymond Queneau Quotes

The Odyssey is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the original romance of the West; but the Iliad, though a magnificent poem, is not much of a story.

All men begin their learning with Homer.

The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.

I would then go on to say that Homer, as we now know, was working in what they call an oral tradition.

When I was nine, I started reading Homer. I would get up at four o'clock in the morning, before I had to go to school, in third or fourth grade, and, for several hours, I would read 'The Iliad' or 'The Odyssey.'

In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern.

I get letters from college kids who have read Percy Jackson when they were younger who tell me, 'I just passed my Classics exam.' The books are accurate enough that they can serve as a gateway to Homer and Virgil.

One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey.

'The Odyssey' is the great tale, and I was really taken by 'The Iliad,' so I dig into those things, and when I was a kid I didn't. You've gotta have a certain level of understanding yourself before that stuff really starts to resonate.

Fiction has consisted either of placing imaginary characters in a true story, which is the Iliad, or of presenting the story of an individual as having a general historical value, which is the Odyssey.

To those who ask if I have read their book, I reply: I have not yet read Homer.

Go over to Greece with the Iliad and Odyssey. These have elements of history, and they have non-historical elements. It's very difficult to pull them apart. And I think there's not much reason to.

In the ancient times, bards went around singing the epics, which were storehouses of philosophy.

My grandfather had a proper bookcase of egghead books, and he gave them to me in alphabetical order. So we moved from Aeschylus to the Brontas, and I can still remember the great relief of going from the dipus cycle to Jane Eyre.

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn't hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading.

Homer was able to give us no information relating to the truth, for he wrote of human rather than divine things.

We should burn all libraries and allow to remain only that which everyone knows by heart. A beautiful age of the legend would then begin.

The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.

Read the writers whose work is still around and has survived the winds of fashion and the attacks of the ignorant and the bigoted - read everything you can get your hands on.

The truly great books are always novels: 'Anna Karenina,' 'The Brothers Karamazov,' 'The Magic Mountain.' Just as with 'Shahnameh,' I browse these books from time to time to remember how a great book works on us or to teach my students at Columbia University.

It has always seemed to me a pity that the young people of our generation should grow up with such scant knowledge of Greek and Latin literature, its wealth and variety, its freshness and its imperishable quality.

If you put a real leaf and a silk leaf side by side, you'll see something of the difference between Homer's poetry and anyone else's. There seem to be real leaves still alive in the 'Iliad,' real animals, real people, real light attending everything.

A very great Iliad... concerns the creation of a nation.

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.