Top 100 Michel Houellebecq Quotes
#1. 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.
Michel Houellebecq
#2. When we think about the present, we veer wildly between the belief in chance and the evidence in favour of determinism. When we think about the past, however, it seems obvious that everything happened in the way that it was intended.
Michel Houellebecq
#3. The feeling of closeness when we talked on the phone was too violent, and the void that came afterward too cruel.
Michel Houellebecq
#4. 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.
Michel Houellebecq
#5. As I got older, I also found myself agreeing more with Nietzsche, as is no doubt inevitable once your plumbing starts to fail.
Michel Houellebecq
#6. 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.
Michel Houellebecq
#7. Bloy was the ultimate weapon against the twentieth century, its mediocrity, its moronic 'engagement,' its cloying humanitarianism; against Sartre, and Camus, and all their political playacting; and against all those sickening formalists, the nouveau roman, the pointless absurdity of it all.
Michel Houellebecq
#8. 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.
Michel Houellebecq
#10. Not having anything around to read is dangerous: you have to content yourself with life itself, and that can lead you to take risks.
Michel Houellebecq
#11. The greater the proportion of pure morality in a particular system, the happier and more enduring the society.
Michel Houellebecq
#13. Nostalgia has nothing to do with aesthetics, it's not even connected to happy memories. We feel nostalgia for a place simply because we've lived there; whether we lived well or badly scarcely matters.
Michel Houellebecq
#14. Tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is so hard to give up hope.
Michel Houellebecq
#15. 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.
Michel Houellebecq
#16. For the French, an intellectual didn't have to be responsible. That wasn't his job.
Michel Houellebecq
#17. Undoubtedly, the best way for a consumer to have a good time in the 2010s was to turn to Korean products: for a car, Kia and Hyundai; for electronics, LG and Samsung.
Michel Houellebecq
#18. You can't be a crazy rebel in the face of death, it's not a fitting attitude.
Michel Houellebecq
#19. When men have no vices, she thought, it's very difficult to guess what might make them happy.
Michel Houellebecq
#20. Now abideth beauty, truth, and intensity; but the greatest of these is intensity.
Michel Houellebecq
#23. The floor was strewn with various animal skins - mainly sheep, I'd guess. It was kind of like being in a German porn flick from the seventies, set in a Tyrolean hunting lodge.
Michel Houellebecq
#24. To give a man 5 sous because he is poor and has no bread is perfect, but to give him a blowjob because he has no girlfriend is too much of a good thing: you don't have to do that.
Michel Houellebecq
#25. There was no way I could think it over without a second Calvados. After thinking it over, I decided that the really prudent thing was to go out and buy another bottle.
Michel Houellebecq
#26. The dream of all men is to meet little sluts who are innocent but ready for all forms of depravity - which is what, more or less, all teenage girls are.
Michel Houellebecq
#27. A woman is human, obviously, but she represents a slightly different kind of humanity.
Michel Houellebecq
#28. Only literature can grant you access to a spirit from beyond the grave - a more direct, more complete, deeper access than you'd have in conversation with a friend.
Michel Houellebecq
#30. It was amazing, even, to think that the only thing left to people in their despair was reading.
Michel Houellebecq
#31. In my life, I had known suffering, oppression, anxiety; I had never known boredom. I could see no objection to the endless, imbecile repetition of sameness.
Michel Houellebecq
#32. In the presence of a reader of Teilhard De Chardin I feel disarmed, nonplussed, ready to break down in tears.
Michel Houellebecq
#33. Youth, beauty, strenght: the criteria for physical lova are exactly the same as those of Nazism.
Michel Houellebecq
#34. 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.
Michel Houellebecq
#35. I wondered what could interest me, now that I was finished with love.
Michel Houellebecq
#36. The press may hate me, and I know my battles with them are not over, but that doesn't matter.
Michel Houellebecq
#37. Separation is another word for evil; it is also another word for deceit. All that exists is a magnificent interweaving, vast and reciprocal.
Michel Houellebecq
#38. 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.
Michel Houellebecq
#39. His masterpiece was a dead end - but isn't that true of any masterpiece?
Michel Houellebecq
#40. When a country is strong ... it accepts any dose of pessimism from its writers.
Michel Houellebecq
#41. Men live alongside one another like cattle; it is a miracle if once in a while they manage to share a bottle of booze.
Michel Houellebecq
#42. To maintain order in your bureaucratic life, you more or less have to stay home; go away for any length of time and you're always likely to run afoul of some agency or other.
Michel Houellebecq
#43. Obstinacy is perhaps the only human quality that matters at the end of the day, not only in the profession of the policeman but in many professions. At least in any that have something to do with the notion of truth.
Michel Houellebecq
#45. The only conclusion he could draw was that without points of reference, a man melts away.
Michel Houellebecq
#46. 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.
Michel Houellebecq
#47. Talking to morons like that is like pissing in a urinal full of cigarette butts, like shitting in a toilet full of Tampax: nothing gets flushed, and everything starts to stink.
Michel Houellebecq
#48. 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.
Michel Houellebecq
#50. The terrible predicament of a beautiful girl is that only an experienced womanizer, someone cynical and without scruple, feels up to the challenge. More often than not, she will lose her virginity to some filthy lowlife in what proves to be the first step in an irrevocable decline.
Michel Houellebecq
#52. I prefer reading to writing. Reading changes your world view. Writing changes absolutely nothing. Except, of course, when it makes you rich.
Michel Houellebecq
#53. It's submission," Rediger murmured. "The shocking and simple idea, which had never been so forcefully expressed, that the summit of human happiness resides in the most absolute submission.
Michel Houellebecq
#54. 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?
Michel Houellebecq
#55. The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.
Michel Houellebecq
#57. These immigrants held out the hope of a new golden age for the old continent.
Michel Houellebecq
#58. I find it an absolute pleasure to read travel guides, especially the Michelin guides, and their description of places I know I'll probably never visit. I spend a large part of my life reading descriptions of restaurants.
Michel Houellebecq
#59. I continued to wonder what exactly I had done to deserve a woman like Valerie. Nothing, probably. I observe the world as it unfurls, I thought; proceeding empirically, in good faith, I observe it; I can do no more than observe.
Michel Houellebecq
#60. It's perfectly possible to live without expecting anything of life; in fact, it's the most common way.
Michel Houellebecq
#61. Through all the years of my sad youth Huysmans remained a companion, a faithful friend; never once did I doubt him,
Michel Houellebecq
#62. What about you, Michel, what are you going to do here?'
The response closest to the truth was probably something like 'Nothing'; but it's always difficult to explain that kind of thing to an active person.
Michel Houellebecq
#63. 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.
Michel Houellebecq
#66. That if a civil war should break out in France, it would take a while to reach the south-west. I knew next to nothing about the south-west, really, only that it was a region where they ate duck confit, and duck confit struck me as incompatible with civil war.
Michel Houellebecq
#67. The Enlightened One, if he had meditated on it, would not necessarily have rejected a technical solution.
Michel Houellebecq
#68. That old queer Nietzsche had it right: Christianity was, at the end of the day, a feminine religion.
Michel Houellebecq
#69. The world outside had its own rules, and those rules were not human.
Michel Houellebecq
#70. I think it's more difficult to live without a religion, definitely.
Michel Houellebecq
#71. Literature has always carried positive connotations in the world of luxury goods.
Michel Houellebecq
#72. If they can read in the eyes of a man an energy, a passion, then they find him attractive.
Michel Houellebecq
#73. 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.
Michel Houellebecq
#74. We are probably wrong to suspect that each individual has some secret passion, some mystery, some weakness; if Jean-Yves's father had had to express his innermost convictions, the profound meaning he ascribed to life, he could probably have cited nothing more than a slight disappointment.
Michel Houellebecq
#76. The academic study of literature leads basically nowhere, as we all know,
Michel Houellebecq
#77. What little private tutoring I'd done, to raise my standard of living, soon convinced me that the transmission of knowledge was generally impossible, the variance of intelligence extreme, and that nothing could undo or even mitigate this basic inequality.
Michel Houellebecq
#78. I think that if writers don't speak about real life, it's because they don't know it.
Michel Houellebecq
#79. That hole she had at the base of her belly must appear so useless to her; a prick can always be cut off, but how do you forget the emptiness of a vagina?
Michel Houellebecq
#80. There is no point in asking me general questions because I am always changing my mind.
Michel Houellebecq
#81. DURING THE FIRST PART of your life, you only become aware of happiness once you have lost it. Then an age comes, a second one, in which you already know, at the moment when you begin to experience true happiness, that you are, at the end of the day, going to lose it.
Michel Houellebecq
#82. When you got right down to it, my dick was the one organ that hadn't presented itself to my consciousness through pain,
Michel Houellebecq
#83. an intellectual didn't have to be responsible. That wasn't his job. In
Michel Houellebecq
#84. The French Revolution, the republic, the motherland ... yes, all that paved the way for something, something that lasted a little more than a century. The Christian Middle Ages lasted a millennium and more.
Michel Houellebecq
#85. Why am I popular? I don't know. Is it a mistake? I should think it's a mistake somewhere.
Michel Houellebecq
#86. When you read the Koran, you give up. At least the Bible is very beautiful because Jews have an extraordinary literary talent.
Michel Houellebecq
#87. You know, you don't have to have permanent opinions. You can think, every morning, 'I love the world' and go to bed every night thinking, 'I hate the world.'
Michel Houellebecq
#89. 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.
Michel Houellebecq
#90. 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.
Michel Houellebecq
#92. But it remains the case that, on the level of consumption, the preeminence of the twentieth century was indisputable: nothing.
Michel Houellebecq
#93. The physical bodies of young people, the only desirable possession the world has ever produced, were reserved for the exclusive use of the young, and the fate of the old was to work and to suffer.
Michel Houellebecq
#94. In reality, the monotheist texts preach neither peace, love nor tolerance. They are texts of hate.
Michel Houellebecq
#95. What could we do, then? We asked ourselves the question while crossing the dunes. Live? It's precisely in this kind of situation that, crushed by the sense of their own insignificance, people decide to have children; this is how the species reproduces, although less and less, it must be said.
Michel Houellebecq
#96. You have to take an interest in something in life, I told myself. I wondered what could interest me, after I was finished with love. I could take a course in wine tasting, maybe , or start collecting model aeroplanes
Michel Houellebecq
#97. The transition to a salaried workforce had doomed the nuclear family and led to the complete atomization of society,
Michel Houellebecq
#98. The mere will to live was clearly no match for the pains and aggravations that punctuate the life of the average Western man.
Michel Houellebecq
#99. On Sunday morning I went out for a while in the neighbourhood; I bought some
raisin bread. The day was warm but a little sad, as Sundays often are in Paris,
especially when one doesn't believe in God.
Michel Houellebecq
#100. It only confirmed what I'd always thought - that for all their education university professors can't even imagine political developments having any effect on their careers : they consider themselves untouchable.
Michel Houellebecq
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