Michel Houellebecq quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Michel Houellebecq

Michel Houellebecq Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Michel Houellebecq on Wise Famous Quotes.

I am for the muscles. I would like to have a lot of muscles, because women like it. I'm for bodybuilding, but it's very exhausting.

Separation is another word for evil; it is also another word for deceit. All that exists is a magnificent interweaving, vast and reciprocal.

It's a curious idea to reproduce when you don't even like life.

I wondered what could interest me, now that I was finished with love.

There is no point in asking me general questions because I am always changing my mind.

Should I just die? The decision struck me as premature.

If you control the children, you control the future.

No doubt the Romans had felt that theirs was an eternal civilization, right up to the moment their empire fell apart. Were they suicides, too?

He doesn't know it yet, but the infinity of childhood is brief.

The academic study of literature leads basically nowhere, as we all know,

The transition to a salaried workforce had doomed the nuclear family and led to the complete atomization of society,

Living together aklone is hell between consenting adults.

On beach holidays, as perhaps in life more generally, the only truly enjoyable time of the day is breakfast.

I was about as political as a bath towel.

Men live alongside one another like cattle; it is a miracle if once in a while they manage to share a bottle of booze.

Life begins at fifty, that's true, inasmuch as it ends at forty.

The feeling of closeness when we talked on the phone was too violent, and the void that came afterward too cruel.

In order to pass the time I told him the story of the German who ate the other German whom he'd met on the internet.

It was amazing, even, to think that the only thing left to people in their despair was reading.

The love of a dog is a pure thing. He gives you a trust which is total. You must not betray it.

I tend to think that good and evil exist and that the quantity in each of us is unchangeable. The moral character of people is set, fixed until death.

His masterpiece was a dead end - but isn't that true of any masterpiece?

But it remains the case that, on the level of consumption, the preeminence of the twentieth century was indisputable: nothing.

the tables were taken by law students talking about rave parties or 'junior associates', in other words, those things which interest law students

Active people don't change the world profoundly; ideas do. Napoleon is less important in world history than Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Now abideth beauty, truth, and intensity; but the greatest of these is intensity.

My novels are all ideas.

In reality, the monotheist texts preach neither peace, love nor tolerance. They are texts of hate.

I don't like this world. I definitely do not like it. The society in which I live disgusts
me; advertising sickens me; computers make me puke.

Using a big word like 'plagiarism' ... always causes some damage. It will always do lasting damage, like accusations of racism.

It's hard to understand other people, to know what's hidden in their hearts, and without the assistance of alcohol it might never be done at all.

People cannot live without God; life becomes unbearable.

Those who think they know me are simply lacking in information.

I'd say that the question whether love still exists plays the same role in my novels as the question of God's existence in Dostoevsky.

There is no Israel for me.

In the end, my cock was all I had.

If they can read in the eyes of a man an energy, a passion, then they find him attractive.

It wasn't easy to cram your whole life into thirty kilos of luggage.

When men have no vices, she thought, it's very difficult to guess what might make them happy.

I think that if writers don't speak about real life, it's because they don't know it.

Literature has always carried positive connotations in the world of luxury goods.

Unhappiness isn't at its most acute point until a realistic chance of happiness, sufficiently close, has been envisioned.

The map is more interesting than the territory.

The press may hate me, and I know my battles with them are not over, but that doesn't matter.

an intellectual didn't have to be responsible. That wasn't his job. In

Beds last on an average much longer than marriages ...

I think that if I am notorious, it is because other people have decided that this is how I should be.

When you read the Koran, you give up. At least the Bible is very beautiful because Jews have an extraordinary literary talent.

Polemical debates happen all the time in France.

Intimacy isn't something men talk about.

When a country is strong ... it accepts any dose of pessimism from its writers.

All in all, I was harking back to the Ancient Greeks. When you get old, you always hark back to the Ancient Greeks.

These immigrants held out the hope of a new golden age for the old continent.

the word humanism made me want to vomit,

What's amazing about Bayrou, what makes him irreplaceable," Tanneur enthused, "is that he's an utter moron.

Were they ready to give up everything for their country? I felt ready to give up everything, not really for my country, but in general.

The Sushi Warehouse in Roissy 2E offered an exceptional range of Norwegian mineral waters.

In that time he had managed to write books that made me consider him a friend more than a hundred years later.

The truth is that men were simply giving up the ghost.

Youth, beauty, strenght: the criteria for physical lova are exactly the same as those of Nazism.

A woman is human, obviously, but she represents a slightly different kind of humanity.

If life is an illusion it's a pretty painful one.

For the French, an intellectual didn't have to be responsible. That wasn't his job.

When you got right down to it, my dick was the one organ that hadn't presented itself to my consciousness through pain,

The only conclusion he could draw was that without points of reference, a man melts away.

The world outside had its own rules, and those rules were not human.

I didn't even want to fuck her, or maybe I kind of wanted to fuck her but I also kind of wanted to die, I couldn't really tell.

In my own writing, I think of myself as a realist who exaggerates a little.

It's perfectly possible to live without expecting anything of life; in fact, it's the most common way.

Not having anything around to read is dangerous: you have to content yourself with life itself, and that can lead you to take risks.

In the presence of a reader of Teilhard De Chardin I feel disarmed, nonplussed, ready to break down in tears.

Happy are those who are satisfied by life, who amuse themselves, who are content.

Much, maybe too much, has been written about literature.

That old queer Nietzsche had it right: Christianity was, at the end of the day, a feminine religion.

Love binds, and it binds forever. Good binds while evil unravels. Separation is another word for evil; it is also another word for deceit.

The mere will to live was clearly no match for the pains and aggravations that punctuate the life of the average Western man.

Even in our deepest, most lasting friendships, we never speak as openly as when we face a blank page and address a reader we do not know.

Yet the special thing about literature, the major art form of a Western civilization now ending before our very eyes, is not hard to define.

As I got older, I also found myself agreeing more with Nietzsche, as is no doubt inevitable once your plumbing starts to fail.

The Enlightened One, if he had meditated on it, would not necessarily have rejected a technical solution.

I was as political as a bath towel

Why am I popular? I don't know. Is it a mistake? I should think it's a mistake somewhere.

What would it be like when I was fifty, sixty, older? I'd be no more than a jumble of organs in slow decomposition.

Rumor had it that he was homosexual; in reality, in recent years, he was simply a garden-variety alcoholic.

It is in our relations with other people that we gain a sense of ourselves; it's that, pretty much, that makes relations with other people unbearable.

While I was waiting to die, I still had the Journal of Nineteenth-Century Studies.

The greater the proportion of pure morality in a particular system, the happier and more enduring the society.

We turn our eyes to the heavens, and the heavens are empty.

To love a book is, above all, to love its author: we want to meet him again, we want to spend our days with him.

The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.

Islam is a dangerous religion.

Tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is so hard to give up hope.

The beach at Meschers was crawling with wankers in shorts and bimbos in thongs. It was reassuring.

The triumph of vegetation is total.

The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain.

The Americans are completely stupid. The intellectual level in any single European country is higher than in America.

I prefer reading to writing. Reading changes your world view. Writing changes absolutely nothing. Except, of course, when it makes you rich.

Father died last year. I don't subscribe to the theory by which we only become truly adult when our parents die; we never become truly adult.

The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.

The most stupid religion is Islam.