Blaise Cendrars Quotes

Photogenic is a stupid, nonsensical word, but it is also a great mystery.

Without the help of selfishness, the human animal would never have developed. Egoism is the vine by which man hoisted himself out of the swamp and escaped from the jungle.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Only a soul full of despair can ever attain serenity and, to be in despair, you must have loved a good deal and still love the world.

I’m not an extraordinary worker, I’m an extraordinary daydreamer. I exceed all my fantasies-even that of writing.

Humanity lives in its fiction.

I used the word ‘prose’ in the Trans-Siberian in the early Latin sense of prosa dictu. Poem seemed to me too pretentious, too narrow. Prose is more open, popular.

A writer should never install himself before a panorama, however grandiose it may be.

Writing is a noble privilege compared with the lot of most people, who live like parts of a machine, who live only to keep the gears of society pointlessly turning.