Michel Houellebecq Quotes

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.

Anything can happen in life, especially nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The most stupid religion is Islam.

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.

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

Adolescence is not only an important period in life, but that it is the only period where one may speak of life in the full sense of the word.

People are suspicious of single men on vacation, after they get to a certain age: they assume that they're selfish, and probably a bit pervy. I can't say they're wrong.

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

To increase desires to an unbearable level whilst making the fulfillment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.

The triumph of vegetation is total.

A reactionary is someone who wants to return to a previous state - that's never a possibility in my books. For me, everything's irreversible in the life of a society, as well as an individual's.

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.

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.

Beds last on an average much longer than marriages.

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

As a teenager, Michel believed that suffering conferred dignity on a person. Now he had to admit that he had been wrong. What conferred dignity on people was television.

Islam is a dangerous religion.

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.

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

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

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

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.

I think it's more difficult to live without a religion, definitely.

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

Polemical debates happen all the time in France.

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

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

I want to be loved despite my faults. It isn't exactly true that I'm a provocateur. A real provocateur is someone who says things he doesn't think, just to shock. I try to say what I think.

My novels are all ideas.

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

If you control the children, you control the future.

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

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

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.