Whatever Michel Houellebecq Quotes

#1. 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

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

Michel Houellebecq

#3. 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

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

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

#8. 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

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

Michel Houellebecq

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

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

Michel Houellebecq

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. Islam is a dangerous religion.

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

Michel Houellebecq

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. I was as political as a bath towel

Michel Houellebecq

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

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

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

#29. 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

#30. 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

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

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq