Select Quotes from Andre Gide

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again. -- Andre Gide

When one has begun to write, the hardest thing is to be sincere. Essential to mull over that idea and to define artistic sincerity. Meanwhile, I hit upon this: the word must never precede the idea. Or else: the word must always be necessitated by the idea. It must be irresistible and inevitable; and the same is true of the sentence, of the whole work of art. And for the artist's whole life, for his vocation must be irresistible. -- Journals, 31 Dec 1891

That a germ of Michel (the immoralist) exists in me goes without saying. How many buds we bear in us, Scheffer, that will never blossom save in our books! They are 'dormant eyes' as the botanists call them. But if intentionally you suppress all of them _but one_, how it grows at once! How it enlarges, immediately monopolizing all the sap! My recipe for creating a fictional hero is very simple: take one of these buds and put it in a pot _all alone_; you soon achieve a wonderful individual. Advice: choose preferably (if it is true you can choose) the bud that bothers you the most. You get rid of it at the same time. This is perhaps what Aristotle called the purging of passions.

Knowing how to free oneself is nothing; it's being free that is hard. -- Gide in The Immoralist

On writing the Immoralist: "I have lived it for four years and have written it to put it behind me. I suffer a book as one suffers an illness. I now respect only the books that all but kill their authors.

It might flippantly be said that the figure of Prometheus has particularly interested the French because he suffered from a particularly French ailment--liver trouble. -- Justin O'Brien, "Portrait of Andre Gide"

I would give my life for God to exist. Yes, that makes sense. But giving my life to prove that God exists makes no sense at all. It simply has no meaning.

It is with fine sentiments that bad literature is made. Descend to the bottom of the well if you wish to see the stars.