Top 35 Amelie Nothomb Quotes
#1. If you admire yourself in the mirror, let it be in fear and not delight, because the only thing that beauty will bring to you is terror of losing it.
Amelie Nothomb
#2. Honor sometimes means doing something very unwise. Behaving like an idiot is better than dishonor. To this day I blush for having chosen sensible restraint over common decency.
Amelie Nothomb
#3. God isn't chocolate, he's the encounter between chocolate and the palate capable of appreciating it.
Amelie Nothomb
#4. More and more I understand that it's very fine not to know where you come from.
Amelie Nothomb
#5. I will never be one of the happy stupid that were born somewhere. This way of life is excellent for the imagination. It develops your paranoia. You feel paranoid when you don't understand a country, and being paranoiac is excellent for fiction.
Amelie Nothomb
#6. When you have a lot of success you don't need vanity any more.
Amelie Nothomb
#7. Language is accurate: you run for your life. If you are dying, leave. If you are suffering, move. There is no other law, only movement.
Amelie Nothomb
#8. There is only one key to knowledge, and that is desire.
Amelie Nothomb
#9. Japanese women live in fear of making the least sound in a bathroom stall. Japanese men pay no attention to the subject whatsoever.
Amelie Nothomb
#10. The purpose of the photograph is to reveal the love that is felt in a single image.
Amelie Nothomb
#11. How good it felt to exist without pride or ambition. To live in hibernation.
Amelie Nothomb
#13. You find the most outrageous deviants in the countries with the most authoritarian systems.
Amelie Nothomb
#14. Every existence contains its primal trauma, an event dividing life into a before and an after, a trauma so great that even the most furtive memory of it is enough to make an individual freeze in irrational, incurable, animal terror.
Amelie Nothomb
#15. Luckily I haven't fallen into the trap, which has claimed so many writers, of living from day to day thinking 'Ah, I'll write a book about that.'
Amelie Nothomb
#16. Because we don't have much time together, I will give you as much love in a year as I could give you in a lifetime.
Amelie Nothomb
#17. I need to be very hungry all the time. I need to be very hungry to write.
Amelie Nothomb
#18. People with menial jobs conjure up what Nietzsche calls a background world, forcing themselves to believe in an earthly or heavenly paradise. Their mental Eden is as seductive as their job is repugnant.
Amelie Nothomb
#19. Are the rules more important to you than friendship?"
" 'Friendship' is a strong word. I'd prefer 'good relationship between colleagues.' "
She proffered this expression with ingenuous, affable calm.
Amelie Nothomb
#20. We are wrong to despise the body: it's so much less bad than the soul. Your soul claims to want things that your body refuses. When your soul is as honest as your body, you will be able to say my name.
Amelie Nothomb
#21. I eat in a strange way, but I enjoy it. Everything became well when I finally understood that I enjoy being hungry. Normally, I only eat in the evening.
Amelie Nothomb
#22. It's while writing that suddenly a point of view appears: 'So, that's what I really thought about this thing'. Then it feels part of me.
Amelie Nothomb
#23. They went on to support their thesis by citing authors with esoteric names, whose works they themselves had not read, a fact which enabled them to speak about them penetratingly.
Amelie Nothomb
#24. If I knew what I was thinking [ ... ] I would never have become a writer.
Amelie Nothomb
#25. I've noticed it a lot. I'm not someone who revises. It's always the first movement, it's that. It's an instinct. Either it works straight away, or it won't ever work.
Amelie Nothomb
#27. I found out that the question was not 'am I good enough to write?', because of course I am not. The question was, 'am I able to live without writing?'. It is the only question.
Amelie Nothomb
#28. Behind every work of art lies the enormous pretension of exhibiting one's vision of the world. If such obvious arrogance is not counterbalanced by the tribulations of doubt, all that remains is a monster who is to art what a fanatic is to faith.
Amelie Nothomb
#29. When I want to be incognito, I don't wear any hat. Unfortunately, even without the hat, they now recognise me in Paris.
Amelie Nothomb
#30. Don't you understand that girls die the day they begin puberty ? Worse than that, they die without disappearing.
Amelie Nothomb
#31. I never even dreamt of being a writer because I didn't feel allowed. When I was a child I was terribly ambitious, but I didn't know at all what this great thing would become.
Amelie Nothomb
#32. But humankind doesn't give a damn ! The proof of it is that in twenty-four years this novel has been collecting dust in libraries and no one, you hear me, no one has ever even talked to me about it. And that's perfectly normal because, as I told you, no one has read it.
Amelie Nothomb
#33. I always knew that adulthood didn't count; following puberty, all existence is but epilogue.
Amelie Nothomb
#34. My mind was not that of a conqueror, but that of a cow that spends its life chewing contentedly in the meadow of invoices, waiting for the train of eternal grace to pass by. How good it felt to exist without pride of ambition. To live in hibernation.
Amelie Nothomb
#35. I thought maybe I would become a god, or a goddess, or a president or a Nobel Prize winner.
Amelie Nothomb
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