Quotes by Michel Houellebecq

About Michel Houellebecq:

Michel Houellebecq is an award-winning French author, filmmaker, and poet. Having written poetry and a biographical essay on the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, he published his first novel, Whatever, in 1994. Atomised followed in 1998, and Platform in 2001. He published a book of poems, Le Sens de Combat (translated into English as The Art of Struggle), in 1996. After a publicity tour for Platform led to his being taken to court for inciting racial hatred, he moved to Ireland to write for several years. He currently resides in France. In 2010 he published the Prix Goncourt-winning La Carte et le Territoire (published the same year in English as The Map and the Territory).
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

He doesn't know it yet, but the infinity of childhood is brief.

Michel Houellebecq

It's a curious idea to reproduce when you don't even like life.

Michel Houellebecq

People often say that the English are very cold fish, very reserved, that they have a way of looking at things – even tragedy – with a sense of irony. There’s some truth in it; it’s pretty stupid of them, though. Humor won’t save you; it do...

Michel Houellebecq

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

Michel Houellebecq

Love binds, and it binds forever. Good binds while evil unravels. Separation is another word for evil; it is also another word for deceit.

Michel Houellebecq

The world outside had its own rules, and those rules were not human.

Michel Houellebecq

Je sais bien que les faits semblent me contredire, je sais bien que l'islam - de loin la plus bête, la plus fausse et la plus obscurantiste de toutes les religions - semble actuellement gagner du terrain; mais ce n'est qu'un phénomène superficiel ...

Michel Houellebecq

Some people live to be seventy, sometimes eighty years old believing there is always something new just around the corner, as they say; in the end they practically have to be killed or at least reduced to a state of serious incapacity to get them to ...

Michel Houellebecq

The Enlightened One, if he had meditated on it, would not necessarily have rejected a technical solution.

Michel Houellebecq

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.

Michel Houellebecq

Contemporary consciousness is no longer equipped to deal with our mortality. Never in any other time, or any other civilization, have people thought so much or so contantly about aging. Each individual has a simple view of the future: a time will com...

Michel Houellebecq

You can't be a crazy rebel in the face of death, it's not a fitting attitude.

Michel Houellebecq

De plus en plus, les théories qui tentaient d’expliquer les phénomènes économiques, de prévoir leurs évolutions, lui apparaissaient a peu prés également inconsistantes, hasardeuses, elle était de plus en plus tentée de les assimiler a du ...

Michel Houellebecq

Las flores son sólo órganos sexuales, vaginas abigarradas que adornan la superficie del mundo, entregadas a la lubricidad de los insectos.

Michel Houellebecq

Olga was nice, Olga was nice and loving, Olga loved him, he repeated to himself with a growing sadness as he also realised that nothing would ever happen between them again, life sometimes offers you a chance he thought, but when you are too cowardly...

Michel Houellebecq

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 l...

Michel Houellebecq

Nul ne peut voir par-dessus soi, écrit Schopenhauer pour faire comprendre l'impossibilité d'un échange d'idées entre deux individus d'un niveau intellectuel trop différent.

Michel Houellebecq

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.

Michel Houellebecq

La solitude à deux est l'enfer consenti.

Michel Houellebecq

Del amor me cuesta hablar. Ahora estoy seguro de que Valérie fue una radiante excepción. Se contaba entre esos seres capaces de dedicar su vida a la felicidad de otra persona, de convertir esa felicidad en su objetivo. Es un fenómeno misterioso. E...

Michel Houellebecq

Author Bio

  • NameMichel Houellebecq
  • DescriptionWriter
  • BornFebruary 26, 1956
  • CountryFrance
  • ProfessionWriter; Poet; Film Director; Songwriter; Essayist; Novelist; Screenwriter
  • WorksThe Map And The Territory
  • AwardsPrix Goncourt