Michel Houellebecq Quotes - Page 3

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

Adolescence is not only an important period in life, but that it is the only period where one may speak of life in the full sense of the word.

Last election shows that there's a big discrepancy between two parts of the country. That discrepancy also exists in France, but we've had the National Front for forty years, and it only took Trump one year to get elected. Very fast. That's the surprising thing. In France we thought everybody liked Obama, but maybe the media were lying. Maybe they didn't.

I feel as if things are falling apart within me, like so many glass partitions shattering. I walk from place to place in the grip of a fury, needing to act, yet can do nothing about it because any attempt seems doomed in advance. Failure, everywhere failure. Only suicide hovers above me, gleaming and inaccessible.

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.

In reality, the monotheist texts preach neither peace, love nor tolerance. They are texts of hate.

I think it's more difficult to live without a religion, definitely.

Islam is a dangerous religion.

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.

My novels are all ideas.

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.

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

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

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.

In my own writing, I think of myself as a realist who exaggerates a little.

Polemical debates happen all the time in France.

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

Father died last year. I don't subscribe to the theory by which we only become truly adult when our parents die; we never become truly adult.