Houellebecq Quotes

#1. Ah, Houellebecq. I've only read him in English translations so I'm sure I'm not getting the full greatness of his work, but golly, he writes better sex scenes than anyone else alive.

Chuck Palahniuk

#2. Michel Houellebecq is the most interesting, provocative and important European novelist of my generation. Period. No one else comes close. He has written two or maybe three great books, and his latest, The Map and the Territory, is one of them.

Bret Easton Ellis

#3. After having read a lot of fiction, literature, whatever you want to call it, from Wolfe to Houellebecq, I think you have to have an understanding and insight of the human condition that is informed and motivated by a desire to immerse yourself in the human world and bring these stories to bear.

Henry Rollins

#4. 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

#5. 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

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

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

#8. 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

#9. 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

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

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. I was as political as a bath towel

Michel Houellebecq

#16. All I knew was that once again I found myself alone, with even less desire to live and nothing to look forward to but aggravations.

Michel Houellebecq

#17. 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

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

Michel Houellebecq

#19. It will all be much easier for the conservatives, who are in even worse shape, and who never cared about education - they hardly even know what education is.

Michel Houellebecq

#20. Islam is a dangerous religion.

Michel Houellebecq

#21. In any case, it wouldn't affect the results at all, but that phrase the balance of power always sounds impressive in conversation, as if you'd been reading Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. I

Michel Houellebecq

#22. 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

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

Michel Houellebecq

#24. 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

#25. I admit that invective is one of my pleasures. This only brings me problems in life, but that's it. I attack, I insult. I have a gift for that, for insults, for provocation. So I am tempted to use it.

Michel Houellebecq

#26. 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.

Michel Houellebecq

#27. The putting to death of morality had, on the whole, become a sort of ritual sacrifice necessary for the reassertion of the dominant values of the group - centered for some decades now on competition, innovation, and energy, more than on fidelity and duty.

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

#29. 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

#30. 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.

Michel Houellebecq

#31. You can't be a crazy rebel in the face of death, it's not a fitting attitude.

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

#35. Or maybe I was just hungry. I'd forgotten to eat the day before, and possibly what I should do was go back to my hotel and sit down to a few duck's legs instead of falling down between the pews in an attack of mystical hypoglycemia.

Michel Houellebecq

#36. Two years before, when the riots started, the media had had a field day, but now people discussed them less and less ... in fact the media's attitude had changed over the last few months. No one talked about violence in the banlieues or race riots anymore. That was all passed over in silence.

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

#41. 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

#42. I maintained a tactical silence. When you maintain a tactical silence and look people right in the eye, as if drinking in their words, they talk. People like to be listened to, as every researcher knows
every researcher, every writer, every spy.

Michel Houellebecq

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. What the boy felt was something pure, something gentle, something that predates sex or sensual fulfillment. It was the simple desire to reach out and touch a loving body, to be held in loving arms. Tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is so difficult to give up hope.

Michel Houellebecq

#46. I was about as political as a bath towel.

Michel Houellebecq

#47. 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

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

Michel Houellebecq

#49. There is no endless silence of infinite space, for in reality there is no space, no silence and no void.

Michel Houellebecq

#50. 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.

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

#52. A whore can always turn herself into a good little cook over time.

Michel Houellebecq

#53. 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

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

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

#57. Thirty years later, Bruno was convinced that, taken in context, the episode could be summed up in one sentence: Caroline Yessayan's miniskirt was to blame for everything.

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

#59. 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

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

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

#62. There is no Israel for me.

Michel Houellebecq

#63. 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

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

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

#66. 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

#67. 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

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

Michel Houellebecq

#69. 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.

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

#72. Some people live to be seventy, sometimes eighty years old believing there is always something new just around the corner, as they say; in the end they practically have to be killed or at least reduced to a state of serious incapacity to get them to see reason.

Michel Houellebecq

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. Living together aklone is hell between consenting adults.

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

#78. In the end, my cock was all I had.

Michel Houellebecq

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. Writing brings scant relief. It retraces, it delimits. It lends a touch of coherence, the idea of a kind of realism. One stumbles around in a cruel fog, but there is the odd pointer. Chaos is no more than a few feet away. A meagre victory, in truth.

Michel Houellebecq

#82. 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

#83. The map is more interesting than the territory.

Michel Houellebecq

#84. 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

#85. For men, love is nothing more than gratitude for the gift of pleasure,

Michel Houellebecq

#86. Western nations took a strange pride in this system, though it amounted to little more than a power-sharing deal between two rival gangs, and they would even go to war to impose it on nations that failed to share their enthusiasm. Over

Michel Houellebecq

#87. Anything can happen in life, especially nothing.

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

#89. 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

#90. 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

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

Michel Houellebecq

#92. My novels are all ideas.

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

#95. 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

#96. 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

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

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

#99. 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.

Michel Houellebecq

#100. Through all the years of my sad youth Huysmans remained a companion, a faithful friend; never once did I doubt him,

Michel Houellebecq