Romain Gary Quotes

With maternal love, life makes a promise at dawn that it can never hold. You are forced to eat cold food until your days end. After that, each time a woman holds you in her arms and against her chest, these are merely condolences. You always come back to yell at your mother's grave like an abandoned dog. Never again, never again, never again.

Disease-carrying thoughts swarm and multiply in the dark and twisted labyrinths of our minds, and all that is needed is a mob and a good political slogan for the epidemic to be spread once again, with a burst of automatic weapons or a mushroom cloud.

Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.

When a war is won, it's the losers, not the winners, who are liberated.

The avantgarde are people who don't exactly know where they want to go, but are the first to get there.

They thought I suffered from lack of exterior, when I suffered from excess of interior

...the only way to prove you are normal is to smash someone's face in

I've had a lot of fun. Good-bye, and thank you.

Men sometimes die much earlier than they are burried.

Sometimes I have the feeling that we live in a dubbed movie and everybody moves their lips but the voices don't correspond. We are all post-synchronized and sometimes is very accomplished and looks natural.

A writer's subconscious is one of the filthiest places there are: as a matter of fact, you can find the whole world there.

As long as you live, you hope. You think that everything will just...get better.

I sat day after day in my little room, waiting for inspiration to visit me, trying to invent a pseudonym that would express, in a combination of noble and striking sounds, our dream of artistic achievement, a pen name grand enough to compensate for my own feeling of insecurity and helplessness at the idea of everything my mother expected from me.

Reality is not an inspiration for literature. At its best, literature is an inspiration for reality.

If there is something that opens horizons, it is precisely ignorance.

I see History as a relay race in which one of us, before dropping in his tracks, must carry one stage further the challenge of being a man.

I am weak, I say with no presumptions. I have no merit, I note it, that is all. There are times that I feel so weak there most be a mistake, and as I don't know what I mean with this, I am not going to say anything else

Literature is greater than any of us, dammit.

'Gari' in Russian means "burn!"... I want to test myself, a trial by fire, so that my 'I' is burned off.

There is more to Jewish history than Auschwitz.