Romain Gary Quotes

9 Sourced Quotes

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
Gari in Russian means "burn!"… I want to test myself, a trial by fire, so that my I is burned off.

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

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
Humour is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.

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

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