Alain Robbe-Grillet > Quotes

“The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.”
― Alain Robbe Grillet

“To tell the truth, girls are no longer the way they used to be. They play gangsters, nowadays, just like boys. They organize rackets. They plan holdups and practice karate. They will rape defenseless adolescents. They wear pants... Life has become impossible.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet, Djinn

“the world is neither meaningful, nor absurd. it quite simply is, and that, in any case, is what is so remarkable about it.”
― Robbe-Grillet Alain

“I am certain that a novelist is someone who attributes a different reality-value to the characters and events of his story than to those of 'real' life. A novelist is someone who confuses his own life with that of his characters.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet

“There is a famous Russian cartoon in which a hippopotamus, in the bush, points out a zebra to another hippopotamus: 'You see,' he says, 'now that’s formalism.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet

“I felt condemned to obscurity and to celibacy. But when one is driven by passion, one can live on almost nothing, and I was driven by passion for writing. One does not starve in modern, Western societies, and one can do without such amenities as the telephone, a car, entertainment.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet

“When a novelist has “something to say,” they mean a message. It has political connotations, or a religious message, or a moral prescription. It means “commitment,” as used by Sartre and other fellow-travelers. They are saying that the writer has a world view, a sort of truth that he wishes to communicate, and that his writing has an ulterior significance. I am against this.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet

“The word "avant-garde," for example, despite its note of impartiality, generally serves to dismiss-as though by a shrug of the shoulders-any work that risks giving a bad conscience to the literature of mass consumption.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction

“The writer must proudly consent to bear his own date, knowing that there are no masterpieces in eternity, but only works in history, and that they survive only to the degree that they have left the past behind them and heralded the future.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet

“A new form will always seem more or less an absence of any form at all, since it is unconsciously judged by reference to the consecrated forms.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet, Pour un Nouveau Roman

“The writer must proudly consent to bear his own date, knowing that there are no masterpieces in eternity, but only works in history.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction

“Indeed, from the viewpoint of the Revolution, everything must directly contribute to the final goal: the liberation of the proletariat... Everything, including literature, painting, etc. But for the artist, on the contrary, and despite his firmest political convictions—even despite his good will as a militant revolutionary—art cannot be reduced to the status of a means in the service of a cause which transcends it, even if this cause were the most deserving, the most exalting; the artist puts nothing above his work, and he soon comes to realize that he can create only for nothing; the least external directive paralyzes him, the least concern for didacticism, or even for signification, is an insupportable constraint; whatever his attachment to his party or to generous ideas, the moment of creation can only bring him back to the problems of his art, and to them alone.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction

“What is the use, it will be asked, if it only concludes, after a more or less long interval, in a new formalism, soon as sclerotic as the old one was? Which comes down to asking why we should go on living, since we must die and make way for others. Art is life.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction

“Why seek to reconstruct the time of clocks in a narrative which is concerned only with human time?”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet, FOR A NEW NOVEL : Essays on Fiction.

“The meaning of the world around us can no longer be considered as other than fragmentary, temporary, and even contradictory, and is always in dispute. How can a work of art set out to illustrate any sort of meaning which is known in advance? The modern movel is an enquiry, but an enquiry which creates its own meaning as it goes along.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Novel Today: Edinburgh International Festival 1962: Programme and Notes, International Writer's Conference

“Roland Barthes: Roman yaratmayı çok istiyorum; hoşuma giden bir roman okuduğumda onun gibi bir şey yapmayı istiyorum, ama ben galiba şimdiye kadar romanın gerekli kıldığı kimi işlemlere direndim. Örneğin; geniş yüzey, devamlılık. Aforizmalardan, fragmanlardan oluşan bir roman yazılabilir mi? Hangi koşullarda bu mümkün olabilir? Romanın roman olarak kendisi de belli bir devamlılığa işaret etmiyor mu? Bu noktada bir direniş olduğunu düşünüyorum. İkinci direniş noktası da adlarla, özel adlarla ilişkimde bulunuyor; özel adlar uydurmayı bilmiyorum, bilemeyeceğim de ve üstelik ben romanın tamamen özel adlarla var olduğunu düşünüyorum...”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet, Why I Love Barthes