14 quotes
People always try to find base motives behind every good action. We are afraid of pure goodness and of pure evil.
The Paris Review interview (1984)
Beckett shows death; his people are in dustbins or waiting for God. (Beckett will be cross with me for mentioning God, but never mind.)
The Paris Review interview (1984)
He understands that the world is an enormous farce, a canular played by God against man, and that he has to play God’s game and laugh about it.
The Paris Review interview (1984)
We exist on several different planes, and when we said nothing had any reason we were referring to the psychological and social plane.
The Paris Review interview (1984)
None of us would have written as we do without surrealism and dadaism. By liberating the language, those movements paved the way for us.
The Paris Review interview (1984)
The most implacable enemies of culture — Rimbaud, Lautréamont, dadaism, surrealism — end up being assimilated and absorbed by it.
The Paris Review interview (1984)
My work has been essentially a dialogue with death, asking him, “Why? Why?” So only death can silence me. Only death can close my lips.
The Paris Review interview (1984)
The Pataphysique is not dead. It lives on in the minds of certain men, even if they are not aware of it. It has gone into “occultation,” as we say, and will come back again one day.
The Paris Review interview (1984)
It won’t matter to me at all whether the Church canonizes him or not. The important thing is that such a man existed.
The Paris Review interview (1984)
Béranger represents the modern man. He is a victim of totalitarianism — of both kinds of totalitarianism, of the Right and of the Left.
The Paris Review interview (1984)
People who don’t read are brutes. It is better to write than to make war, isn’t it?
The Paris Review interview (1984)
You know, the Cathars believed that the world was not created by God but by a demon who had stolen a few technological secrets from Him and made this world — which is why it doesn’t work.
The Paris Review interview (1984)
I let characters and symbols emerge from me, as if I were dreaming.
The Paris Review interview (1984)
My thoughts were not yet organized or coherent at that age, but I had feelings, a certain nascent humanism, and I found these things inadmissible.
The Paris Review interview (1984)