For a New Novel Quotes

“The word "avant-garde," for example, despite its note of impartiality, generally serves to dismiss-as though by a shrug of the shoulders-any work that risks giving a bad conscience to the literature of mass consumption.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction

“Indeed, from the viewpoint of the Revolution, everything must directly contribute to the final goal: the liberation of the proletariat... Everything, including literature, painting, etc. But for the artist, on the contrary, and despite his firmest political convictions—even despite his good will as a militant revolutionary—art cannot be reduced to the status of a means in the service of a cause which transcends it, even if this cause were the most deserving, the most exalting; the artist puts nothing above his work, and he soon comes to realize that he can create only for nothing; the least external directive paralyzes him, the least concern for didacticism, or even for signification, is an insupportable constraint; whatever his attachment to his party or to generous ideas, the moment of creation can only bring him back to the problems of his art, and to them alone.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction

“What is the use, it will be asked, if it only concludes, after a more or less long interval, in a new formalism, soon as sclerotic as the old one was? Which comes down to asking why we should go on living, since we must die and make way for others. Art is life.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction

“Why seek to reconstruct the time of clocks in a narrative which is concerned only with human time?”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet, FOR A NEW NOVEL : Essays on Fiction.

“The writer must proudly consent to bear his own date, knowing that there are no masterpieces in eternity, but only works in history.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction

“A new form will always seem more or less an absence of any form at all, since it is unconsciously judged by reference to the consecrated forms.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet, Pour un Nouveau Roman