Julien Green's Quotes

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.

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.

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.

A scrupulous man will never produce a great novel.

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

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

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

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

What is real is beyond all reach.

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.

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.

Though pleas'd to see the dolphins play, I mind my compass and my way.

Avarice, the sphincter of the heart.

Experience join'd with common sense, To mortals is a providence.

Fling but a stone, the giant dies.

Nor bigots who but one way see, through blinkers of authority.

Talk of unusual swell of waist In maid of honor loosely laced.

They politics like ours profess, the greater prey upon the less.

Thus, I steer my bark, and sail On even keel, with gentle gale.