Quotes About Simenon

Betty is by now a rudderless drunk, cast out by her husband and making heavy weather around the bars of Versailles. Simenon is at his finest in establishing his heroine's fuzzy states of mind at this point. The novel then revolves about the relationship between Betty and Laure Lavancher, a physician's widow who takes Betty in and nurses her back to malevolence. Simenon readers know enough not to expect rainbows.

Inevitably Maigret was a hostile presence in the Majestic. He constituted a kind of foreign body that the hotel's atmosphere could not assimilate.

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.