Julien Green Quotations

If people only knew what lies at the heart of my novels! What a tumult of desires these carefully written pages conceal! I sometimes have a loathing for the furious cravings that give me no peace except when I am working.

The greatest explorer on this earth never takes voyages as long as those of the man who descends to the depth of his heart.

I have always thought that by observing things with a great deal of attention you eventually wrest some of their secrets from them, making them utter what they would most like to keep to themselves.

I enter the world called real as one enters a mist.

Thoughts fly and words go on foot. Therein lies all the drama of a writer.

The man I am will always raise a protest against the man I wanted to be and the two will live together to the end, but the man I wanted to be will be the one on whom judgement will be passed.

Perhaps the greatest consolation of the oppressed is to consider themselves superior to their tyrants.

A dish around which I see too many people doesn't tempt me.

Anti-clericalism and non-belief, have their bigots just as orthodoxy does.

The secret is to write just anything, to dare to write just anything, because when you write just anything, you begin to say what is important.

Yesterday, happiness came in suddenly, as it used to, and remained for a moment in the great, dark, silent drawing room.

Thought flies and words go on foot.

Within ourselves is not very far and yet it is so far that one's whole life is not always long enough to get there.

Let us hope that good authors who are bad Christians will find salvation through the books they write.

A scrupulous man will never produce a great novel.

Our life is a book that writes itself and whose principal themes sometimes escape us. We are like characters in a novel who do not always understand what the author wants of them.

I am probably exaggerating a little, but I owe my equilibrium to ink and paper.

You cannot imagine at all how much you interest God; He is interested in you as if there were no one else on earth.

A child's fear is a world whose dark corners are quite unknown to grownup people; it has its sky and its abysses, a sky without stars, abysses into which no light can ever penetrate.