Quotes from Georges Simenon

A fisherman, who had just speared an octopus with his trident, was skinning it as its tentacles rolled around his tattooed arm.

Maigret avait déjà tenté de faire admettre par d'autres, y compris par des hommes d'expérience, que ceux qui dégringolent, en particulier ceux qui mettent un acharnement morbide à descendre toujours plus bas et qui se salissent à plaisir, sont presque toujours des idéalistes.

Detective Chief Inspector Maigret of the Flying Squad raised his eyes. It seemed to him that the cast-iron stove in the middle of his office with its chimney tube rising to the ceiling wasn't roaring properly. He pushed the telegram away, rose ponderously to his feet, adjusted the flue and thrust three shovels of coal into the firebox.

It only takes a few minutes, a few seconds, to become a murderer. Before that you're a man like any other.

INTERVIEWER What do you mean by "too literary"? What do you cut out, certain kinds of words? SIMENON Adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sentence—cut it. Every time I find such a thing in one of my novels it is to be cut.

Aveau destul timp, È™i unul È™i altul, întreg timpul care îi va separa din momentul în care unul din ei ar muri.

It was night and I could see a large and calm lake, reflecting the moon. Black mountains rose around it. I arrived from between two of these mountains, I looked at the lake and the moon, and that was it, nothing else happened.

Trotsky rises to give me his hand, then sits at his desk, gently allowing his regard to light on my person.

I have always tried to write in a simple way, using down-to-earth and not abstract words.

The fact that we are I don't know how many millions of people, yet communication, complete communication, is completely impossible between two of those people, is to me one of the biggest tragic themes in the world.

The lake and the mountains have become my landscape, my real world.

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.

One of them, for example, which will probably haunt me more than any other is the problem of communication.

The fact that we are I don't know how many millions of people, yet communication, complete communication, is completely impossible between two of those people, is to me one of the biggest tragic themes in the world.

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don't think an artist can ever be happy.

We are all potentially characters in a novel--with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.

It just happened. As though a moment comes when it's both necessary and natural to make a decision that has long since been made.

The place smelled of fairgrounds, of lazy crowds, of nights when you stayed out because you couldn't go to bed, and it smelled like New York, of its calm and brutal indifference.

The poor are used to stifling any expression of their despair, because they must get on with life, with work, with the demands made of them day after day, hour after hour.

His mouth open, he fell asleep, because a man always falls asleep in the end. One weeps, one shrieks, one rages, one despairs, and then one eats and sleeps as if nothing had happened.

I would like to carve my novel in a piece of wood. My characters—I would like to have them heavier, more three-dimensional ... My characters have a profession, have characteristics; you know their age, their family situation, and everything. But I try to make each one of those characters heavy, like a statue, and to be the brother of everybody in the world.

They never addressed each other by name, nor were they in the habit of exchanging endearments. What was the point, since both felt that, in many ways, they were one person?

Si parte da un dettaglio qualsiasi, talvolta di poco conto, e senza volerlo si giunge a scoprire grandi princìpi.

And Boucard desisted, probably because like everyone else he was deeply impressed by this man who had laid all ghosts, who had lost all shadows, and who stared you in the eyes with cold serenity.