Raymond Queneau

“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. Learning to learn is to know what to ignore...”

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

“Inspiration which consists in blind obedience to every impulse is in reality a sort of slavery.”

“L'instruction! Voyez ce que c'est, monsieur, que l'instruction. On apprend quelque chose à l'école, on se donne même du mal, beaucoup de mal, pour apprendre quelque chose à l'école, et puis...”

“All confessions are Odysseys.”

“It seems to me that an author who has determined very new domains in literature is Gertrude Stein.”

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

“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 t...”

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

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

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

“The Odyssey is the story of Americans up to the point where they are well-established, and even so it is detached from the historical side.”

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

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