Quotes from Michel Houellebecq

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.

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.'

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

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

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.

Active people don't change the world profoundly; ideas do. Napoleon is less important in world history than Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

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

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

I think poetry is the only domain where a writer you like can truly be said to influence you, because you read and reread a poem so many times that it simply drills itself into your head.

Why am I popular? I don't know. Is it a mistake? I should think it's a mistake somewhere.

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

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

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.

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.

Not having anything around to read is dangerous: you have to content yourself with life itself, and that can lead you to take risks.

If life is an illusion it's a pretty painful one.

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.

I think that if writers don't speak about real life, it's because they don't know it.

In order to pass the time I told him the story of the German who ate the other German whom he'd met on the internet.

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

I think that there is a sharp contrast for most people between life at university, where they meet lots of people, and the moment when they enter the workforce, when they basically no longer meet anyone. Life becomes dull. So as a result people get married to have a personal life. I could elaborate but I think everyone understands.

Polemical debates happen all the time in France.

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

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.