Houellebecq Whatever Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

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

Michel Houellebecq

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

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

Michel Houellebecq

#9. 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

#10. 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

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

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. Intimacy isn't something men talk about.

Michel Houellebecq

#18. 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

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

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

#21. 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

#22. 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

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

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. I was as political as a bath towel

Michel Houellebecq

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

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

Michel Houellebecq

#33. 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

#34. Islam is a dangerous religion.

Michel Houellebecq