Life & Wisdom Quote by Claude Simon

Claude Simon reduces the grand drama of literature to a stubbornly practical problem: getting a sentence to behave. The line refuses the romantic myth of inspiration and swaps it for something more bracing - composition as labor, not lightning. “Big chore” is doing a lot of quiet work here. It’s almost willfully unglamorous, a phrase that drags the writer’s life out of the clouds and into the workshop, where language is less a gift than a material with grain, knots, and splinters.

The triptych - begin, continue, complete - reads like a mantra and a trap. Simon’s intent isn’t to sound modest; it’s to name the real battleground. Beginnings carry the burden of choice, continuing is the terror of maintaining coherence without killing surprise, and completion is its own violence: deciding where to stop, what to exclude, what to let stand as “finished” when the mind can always add one more clause, one more correction, one more revision that promises clarity and delivers only more sentence.

Context matters because Simon, a central figure of the Nouveau Roman, wrote against tidy storytelling. His books often move through fragments, looping perceptions, and time broken by memory - the world as it’s actually experienced rather than neatly narrated. In that aesthetic, the sentence isn’t just a vehicle for plot; it’s the plot. The subtext is almost existential: if you can’t reliably begin or end a sentence, you can’t reliably begin or end meaning. Writing becomes a daily renegotiation with chaos, staged one clause at a time.