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The bad novelist constructs his characters he directs them and makes them speak. The true novelist listens to them and watches them act he hears their voices even before he knows them.

Andre Gide

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Andre Gide
Age: 82 †
Born: 1869
Born: November 22
Died: 1951
Died: December 19
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Essayist
Film Producer
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Prosaist
Translator
Travel Writer
Writer
Paris
France
André Paul Guillaume Gide
Andre Gide
Andre Paul Guillaume Gide
Characters
Watches
Directs
Voice
Listens
Speak
Hears
Makes
Novelist
True
Constructs
Character
Novelists
Even
Voices

More quotes by Andre Gide

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It is now, and in this world, that we must live.
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The most decisive actions of our life - I mean those that are most likely to decide the whole course of our future - are, more often than not, unconsidered.
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Man: The most complex of beings, and thus the most dependent of beings. On all that made you up, you depend.
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The very act of sacrifice magnifies the one who sacrifices himself to the point where his sacrifice is much more costly to humanity than would have been the loss of those for whom he is sacrificing himself. But in his abnegation lies the secret of his grandeur.
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Profound optimism is always on the side of the tortured.
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It would be wisest not to worry too much about the sterile periods. They ventilate the subject and instill into it the reality of daily life.
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There's a law in life: whenever a door closes, a new one will open.
Andre Gide
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It is often so: the harder it is to hear, the more a truth is worth saying.
Andre Gide
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Welcome anything that comes to you, but do not long for anything else.
Andre Gide
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He who wants a rose must respect her thorn.
Andre Gide
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Often with good sentiments we produce bad literature.
Andre Gide
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Art that submits to orthodoxy, to even the soundest doctrines, but lacks imagination and deep self-expression is lost leaving only the craftsmanship.
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The individual man tries to escape the race. And as soon as he ceases to represent the race, he represents man.
Andre Gide
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Oh, would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas, as the tree does its withered leaves!
Andre Gide
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To know how to free oneself is nothing the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom.
Andre Gide
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An artist cannot get along without a public and when the public is absent, what does he do? He invents it, and turning his back on his age, he looks toward the future for what the present denies.
Andre Gide
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I wished for nothing beyond her smile, and to walk with her thus, hand in hand, along a sun warmed, flower bordered path.
Andre Gide
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I am lost if I attempt to take count of chronology. When I think over the past, I am like a person whose eyes cannot properly measure distances and is liable to think things extremely remote which on examination prove to be quite near.
Andre Gide
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Actions whose motives he cannot understand that is, actions not prompted by the hope of profit.
Andre Gide
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No theory is good unless it permits, not rest, but the greatest work. No theory is good except on condition that one use it to go on beyond.
Andre Gide