J. M. G. Le Clezio Quotes

My job as an author - at least the way I think of it - is to make a story that is coded and puzzling enough to entice conversation and interpretation, but also to do the opposite: to make some things clear so that it is meaningful in some way, not just a random assemblage of ideas.

When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.

I would recommend the short story form, which is a lot harder to write since you have to be so careful with words, until there is plenty of time to doodle through a novel.

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

I'm a novelist. I'm not a crusader, and I'm not an editorial writer. And I'm not writing fiction to convince anybody of anything.

I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

'Gone-Away World' was a shotgun blast, an explosion out of the box I'd put myself into writing film scripts. 'Tigerman' is shorter, tighter, more crafted.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

I don't feel that I wanted to spend my whole writing life - which is my life - writing detective stories.

If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms.

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.

It wasn't until I started to read short stories - by people like Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, John Updike... Eudora Welty - that I became excited about the possibilities of writing.

I'm not working on the Great American Novel. All I am doing, I hope, is entertaining readers.

As much as I really like the screenwriting thing, the novel is where the author has so much control.

A novel is 400 pages; it's an endurance race. There's no artist, so I have to describe everything. It's all prose. Whereas with comics, I can rely on the artist. It's really wonderful to have that collaboration and to not always feel the burden of describing everything myself and also just to have someone who can paint the world.

I think there are people who are born storytellers. I think of someone like T. C. Boyle or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I think really, without putting any pejorative on it, they're like carnival barkers, 'Come into the tent, and I'll tell you this story.'

A novel, at least for me, cannot be visualized at one time.

When we talk about novels, we don't often talk about imagination. Why not? Does it seem too first grade? In reviews, you read about limpid prose, about the faithful reproduction of consciousness, about moral heft, but rarely about the power of pure, unadulterated imagination.

I remember that the day I finished 'The Angels,' part three of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative.

I do not think of literature as something confessional or therapeutic. I make sentences in order to be precise about experiences and things. I am urged by many things and no things in particular.

You learn different things through fiction. Historians are always making a plot about how certain things came to happen. Whereas a novelist looks at tiny little things and builds up a sort of map, like a painting, so that you see the shapes of things.