Romain Gary quotes

Romain Gary was a French novelist, diplomat, and film director of Lithuanian-Jewish origin. Renowned for his literary versatility, he is the only person to have won the Prix Goncourt twice under different names. He explored themes of identity and human resilience in his work. Here are 18 of his quotes:

I want to test myself, a trial by fire, so that my I is burned off.

Romain Gary

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

Romain Gary

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

Romain Gary

There is more to Jewish history than Auschwitz.

Romain Gary

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

Romain Gary

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

Romain Gary

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.

Romain Gary

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.

Romain Gary

Literature is greater than any of us, dammit.

Romain Gary

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

Romain Gary

Men sometimes die much earlier than they are burried.

Romain Gary

The bombs I dropped on Germany between 1940 and 1944 maybe killed a Rilke or a Goethe or a Hölderin in his cradle. And yes, of course, if it had to be done over, I would do it again. Hitler had condemned us to kill. Not even the most just causes are ever innocent.

Romain Gary

During the war he was an airman and slaughtered civilians from on high.

Romain Gary

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

Romain Gary

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

Romain Gary

The gossip that came back to me from fashionable dinners where people pitied poor Romain Gary, who must be a little sad, a little jealous of the meteoric rise in the literary firmament of his cousin Emile Ajar... I've had a lot of fun. Good-bye, and thank you.

Romain Gary