It doesn't seem to me that anyone has discovered much that's new since the Iliad or the Odyssey..

Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical con….

Man's usual routine is to work and to dream and work and dream..

The poet is never inspired, because he is the master of that which appears to others as inspiration. He does not wait for inspiration to fall out of ….

All societies are historical..

The Iliad is the private lives of people thrown into disorder by history..

Being or nothing, that is the question. Ascending, descending, coming, going, a man does so much that in the end he disappears..

All confessions are Odysseys..

Ulysses finds himself unchanged, aside from his experience, at the end of his odyssey..

Learning to learn is to know how to navigate in a forest of facts, ideas and theories, a proliferation of constantly changing items of knowledge. Lea….

There have been only rare moments in history where individual histories were able to run their course without wars or revolutions..

The Odyssey is the story of someone who, in the course of diverse experiences, acquires a personality or affirms and recovers his personality..

To have one's own story told by a third party who doesn't know that the character in question is himself the hero of the story being told, that's a t….

True stories deal with hunger, imaginary ones with love..

It isn’t happiness I am concerned with but experience..

We have gotten away from this double aspect of either putting the character back into historical events or of making a historical event of his very l….

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 havi….

Happy nations have no history. History is the study of mankind's misfortune..

The most heartbreakingly poignant modern love story ever written..

It is the creator of fiction's point of view; it is the character who interests him. Sometimes he wants to convince the reader that the story he is t….

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