Le Clézio não está à procura de afirmações

"Literature is the contrary of knowledge - it's asking questions. It's contrary to affirmation. During and after the Second World War, people were not sure of anything. [...] Those were terrible times. [...] Literature could not give lessons. Literature could only question and express angst, your anger, and sometimes your derision-but it could not give you security.

I believe strongly that literature is one of the ways to achieve interculturality. If we don't achieve it through words and through the imagination, then it will never be possible. It has to exist first in books and in the imagination. The fact that cultures have a right to express themselves and that there is no culture better than the other-they are not alike, but they have a right to the general concert of the human spirit. Literature is a way to achieve this. It's a rare occasion of being able to hear the world voices- it's a beautiful phrase, "world voices." We have to hear to the world voices, and I think literature is a good way to do so, because novelists and poets are probably less concerned with power, less concerned with politics. Sometimes they suffer from politics, they suffer from censorship; they're jailed and even sometimes killed. [...]"  (Le Clézio em entrevista a Adam Gopnik)

publicado no Pen America, A Journal for Writers and Readers, 2009