INTERVIEWER
We are far from autobiography in your work; so readers and critics end up by being curious about your life. You give little importance to all that. Why, do you think, do so many serious writers insist on not writing autobiography in their books? […]
SARRAUTE
[…] We are so complex and we have so many facets, that what interests me in an autobiography is what the author wants me to see. He wants me to see him like that. That’s what amuses me. And it’s always false. I don’t at all like Freud and I detest psychoanalysis, but one of Freud’s statements I have always found very interesting, and true, is that all autobiographies are false. Obviously, because I can do an autobiography that will show a saint, a being who is absolutely idyllic, and I could do another that will show a demon, and it will all be true. Because it’s all mixed together. And in addition, one can’t even attain all that.