Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio said this quote

I thought that to get to know a desert it was enough to have been there. I thought that to have seen the dogs dying along the Cholula road, or to have seen the eyes of the lepers at Chiengmai gave me the right to talk about it. To have seen! To have been there! Rubbish! The world is not a book, it proves nothing. The spaces one has crossed were dark corridors with closed doors. The faces of the women to whom one gave oneself up completely: did they speak for anyone but themselves? The cities of man are secret. One walks along their streets, one sees them shine under one's feet, but one is not there, one never enters them. The dusty fields inhabited by people who are hungry, who wait patiently, are paradises of luxury and nourishment; shining at a vast distance from intelligence, at a vast distance from reason. They are not to be subjugated.

~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio

Real lives have no end. Real books have no end.

~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio

[M]ay not literature (and, in particular, fiction) be considered a desperate and permanently thwarted effort to produce a unique form of expression? Something like a cry, perhaps, a cry that, somehow, inexplicably contains all the millions of words that have ever existed, anywhere, in any age. In contrast with the spoken word and its classifying function, the purpose of writing seems, rather, to be a quest for the egg, the seed, nothing more.

~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio

The world was a sick animal, a sort of huge cancerous tumour, a thing of bubbling liquids, whitish patches, dribbling pus, fantastic pimples of dead skin that grew in all directions, swelled up, became more and more like fuzzy hair. The right thing would be to go away, to vanish for ever from the face of the sun.

~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio