Quotes from Michel Houellebecq

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.

Youth, beauty, strength: the criteria for physical love are exactly the same as those of Nazism.

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

Like literature, music can overwhelm you with sudden emotion, can move you to absolute sorrow or ecstasy; like literature, painting has the power to astonish, and to make you see the world through fresh eyes. But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting, or repugnant.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

To love a book is, above all, to love its author: we want to meet him again, we want to spend our days with him.

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.

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.

Living together alone is hell between consenting adults.

I think she is going to find you too old... Yes that was it, the moment she said it I knew it was true, and the revelation caused me no surprise, it was like the echo of a dull, not unexpected shock. The age difference was the last taboo, the final limit, all the stronger for the fact that it remained the last and had replaced all the others. In the modern world you could be a swinger, bi, trans, zoo into S&M, but it was forbidden to be old.

What about you, Michel, what are you going to do here?' The response closest to the truth was probably something like 'Nothing'; but it's always difficult to explain that kind of thing to an active person.

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

This progressive effacement of human relationships is not without certain problems for the novel. How, in point of fact, would one handle the narration of those unbridled passions, stretching over many years, and at times making their effect felt on several generations? We're a long way from Wuthering Heights, to say the least. The novel form is not conceived for depicting indifference or nothingness; a flatter, more terse, and dreary discourse would need to be invented.

The story of a life can be as long or as short as the teller wishes. Whether the life is tragic or enlightened, the classic gravestone inscription marking simply the dates of birth and death has, in its brevity, much to recommend it.

Refuser de faire quelque chose parce qu'on l'a déjà fait, parce qu'on a déjà vécu l'expérience, conduit rapidement à une destruction, pour soi-même comme pour les autres, de toute raison de vivre comme de tout futur possible, et vous plonge dans un ennui pesant qui finit par se transformer en une amertume atroce, accompagnée de haine et de rancoeur à l'égard de ceux qui appartiennent encore à la vie.

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

The academic study of literature leads basically nowhere, as we all know

it's true this world our breathing laboured inspires nothing more than obvious disgust a desire to flee without our share and no longer read the headlines we long to return to our ancestral home where our forebears once lived under an angel's wing we long to find that strange morality which sanctified life to the end we crave something like loyalty like the embrace of mild addictions something that transcends yet contains life we cannot live far from eternity

The triumph of vegetation is total.

Tout est kitsch, si l'on veut. La musique dans son ensemble est kitsch; l'art est kitsch; la littérature elle-même est kitsch. Toute émotion est kitsch, pratiquement par définition; mais toute réflexion aussi, et même dans un sens toute action. La seule chose qui ne soit absolument pas kitsch, c'est le néant.