Georges Simenon Quotes & Sayings

#1. It was night and I could see a large and calm lake, reflecting the moon. Black mountains rose around it. I arrived from between two of these mountains, I looked at the lake and the moon, and that was it, nothing else happened.

Georges Simenon

#2. I am at home everywhere, and nowhere. I am never a stranger and I never quite belong.

Georges Simenon

#3. We are all potentially characters in a novel
with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.

Georges Simenon

#4. We live in a time when writers do not always have barriers around them

Georges Simenon

#5. A novelist is a man who doesn't like his mother.

Georges Simenon

#6. If your vision of the world is of a certain kind you will put poetry in everything, necessarily.

Georges Simenon

#7. The place smelled of fairgrounds, of lazy crowds, of nights when you stayed out because you couldn't go to bed, and it smelled like New York, of its calm and brutal indifference.

Georges Simenon

#8. The fact that we are I don't know how many millions of people, yet communication, complete communication, is completely impossible between two of those people, is to me one of the biggest tragic themes in the world.

Georges Simenon

#9. I have always tried to write in a simple way, using down-to-earth and not abstract words.

Georges Simenon

#10. It was the serene cheerfulness of a man who has no nightmares, who feels at peace with himself and everyone else. They [Americans] were almost all of them like that. And it definitely got Maigret's back up. It made him think of clothing that was too neat, too clean, too well-pressed.

Georges Simenon

#11. I write fast, because I have not the brains to write slow.

Georges Simenon

#12. I saw Mussolini tirelessly contemplate a parade of thousands of young men.

Georges Simenon

#13. Sunday lay so heavily in the air as to become almost nauseating. Maigret used to claim openly, half seriously, half in fun, that he had always had the knack of sensing a Sunday from his bed, without even having to open his eyes.

Georges Simenon

#14. Trotsky rises to give me his hand, then sits at his desk, gently allowing his regard to light on my person.

Georges Simenon

#15. His mouth open, he fell asleep, because a man always falls asleep in the end. One weeps, one shrieks, one rages, one despairs, and then one eats and sleeps as if nothing had happened.

Georges Simenon

#16. It just happened. As though a moment comes when it's both necessary and natural to make a decision that has long since been made.

Georges Simenon

#17. I'm a bit like a sponge. When I'm not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little - and out comes, not water but ink.

Georges Simenon

#18. She came forward, the outlines of her figure blurred in the half-light. She came forward like a film star, or rather like the ideal woman in an adolescent's dream.

Georges Simenon

#19. And Boucard desisted, probably because like everyone else he was deeply impressed by this man who had laid all ghosts, who had lost all shadows, and who stared you in the eyes with cold serenity.

Georges Simenon

#20. The poor are used to stifling any expression of their despair, because they must get on with life, with work, with the demands made of them day after day, hour after hour.

Georges Simenon

#21. He had read endless books, he had digested them, pondered over them. Day by day, year after year, he had turned over all the problems of human beings. Yet there were all sorts of simple things he didn't know how to do: he couldn't even walk into an inn and sit down at a table.

Georges Simenon

#22. He now understood deathbed dramas. Everybody thinks about death. But only one person thinks about it for himself. The others know that in the morning the sun will come through the blinds and their coffee will be served." From "The Reckoning

Georges Simenon

#23. For 30 years I have tried to make it understood that there are no criminals,

Georges Simenon

#24. I adore life but I don't fear death. I just prefer to die as late as possible.

Georges Simenon

#25. Madame ... gloatingly savored her words as earlier she had savored her pig's trotter.

Georges Simenon

#26. They never addressed each other by name, nor were they in the habit of exchanging endearments. What was the point, since both felt that, in many ways, they were one person?

Georges Simenon

#27. The change in the girl's face was more subtle, almost invisible; it was not joy, there was no sparkle, but something like a serene contentment. It was as though she had ripened, as though there were a growing plenitude in her, never there before.

Georges Simenon