Michel Houellebecq
You can't be a crazy rebel in the face of death, it's not a fitting attitude.Collection: Attitude
Those who think they know me are simply lacking in information.Collection: Thinking
Anything can happen in life, especially nothing.Collection: Anything Can Happen
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.Collection: Girl
To the end, I will remain a child of Europe, of worry and of shame. I have no message of hope to deliver. For the West, I do not feel hatred. At most I feel a great contempt. I know only that every single one of us reeks of selfishness, masochism and death. We have created a system in which it has simply become impossible to live, and what's more, we continue to export it.Collection: Children
Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.Collection: Love Life
Irony won't save you from anything; humour doesn't do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn't matter how brave you are, or how reserved, or how much you've developed a sense of humour, you still end up with your heart broken. That's when you stop laughing.Collection: Heart
Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women, others with none. It’s what’s known as ‘the law of the market’… In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude.Collection: Men
The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain.Collection: Brain
There is no point in asking me general questions because I am always changing my mind.Collection: Mind
The world outside had its own rules, and those rules were not human.Collection: World
I've lived so little that I tend to imagine I'm not going to die; it seems improbable that human existence can be reduced to so little; one imagines, in spite of oneself, that sooner or later something is bound to happen. A big mistake. A life can just as well be both empty and short. The days slip by indifferently, leaving neither trace nor memory; and then all of a sudden they stop.Collection: Memories
The Americans are completely stupid. The intellectual level in any single European country is higher than in America.Collection: Country
It is interesting to note that the "sexual revolution" was sometimes portrayed as a communal utopia, whereas in fact it was simply another stage in the historical rise of individualism. As the lovely word "household" suggests, the couple and the family would be the last bastion of primitive communism in liberal society. The sexual revolution was to destroy these intermediary communities, the last to separate the individual from the market. The destruction continues to this day.Collection: Couple
When you read the Koran, you give up. At least the Bible is very beautiful because Jews have an extraordinary literary talent.Collection: Beautiful
Not having anything around to read is dangerous: you have to content yourself with life itself, and that can lead you to take risks.Collection: Risk
Tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is so hard to give up hope.Collection: Giving Up
I want to be loved despite my faults. It isn't exactly true that I'm a provocateur. A real provocateur is someone who says things he doesn't think, just to shock. I try to say what I think.Collection: Real
If life is an illusion it's a pretty painful one.Collection: Life Is
Without beauty a girl is unhappy because she has missed her chance to be loved. People do not jeer at her, they are not cruel to her, but it is as if she were invisible, no eyes follow her as she walks. People feel uncomfortable when they are with her. They find it easier to ignore her. A girl who is exceptionally beautiful, on the other hand, who has something which too far surpasses the customary seductive freshness of adolescence, appears somehow unreal. Great beauty seems invariably to portend some tragic fate.Collection: Beautiful
The love of a dog is a pure thing. He gives you a trust which is total. You must not betray it.Collection: Dog
The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.Collection: Boredom
The terrible predicament of a beautiful girl is that only an experienced womanizer, someone cynical and without scruple, feels up to the challenge. More often than not, she will lose her virginity to some filthy lowlife in what proves to be the first step in an irrevocable decline.Collection: Beautiful
Active people don't change the world profoundly; ideas do. Napoleon is less important in world history than Jean-Jacques Rousseau.Collection: Ideas
It's a curious idea to reproduce when you don't even like life.Collection: Ideas
Love binds, and it binds forever. Good binds while evil unravels. Separation is another word for evil; it is also another word for deceit.Collection: Evil
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.Collection: Important
I feel as if things are falling apart within me, like so many glass partitions shattering. I walk from place to place in the grip of a fury, needing to act, yet can do nothing about it because any attempt seems doomed in advance. Failure, everywhere failure. Only suicide hovers above me, gleaming and inaccessible.Collection: Suicide
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.Collection: Character
Last election shows that there's a big discrepancy between two parts of the country. That discrepancy also exists in France, but we've had the National Front for forty years, and it only took Trump one year to get elected. Very fast. That's the surprising thing. In France we thought everybody liked Obama, but maybe the media were lying. Maybe they didn't.Collection: Country
I think it's more difficult to live without a religion, definitely.Collection: Thinking
Islam is a dangerous religion.Collection: Islam
I am for the muscles. I would like to have a lot of muscles, because women like it. I'm for bodybuilding, but it's very exhausting.Collection: Bodybuilding
My novels are all ideas.Collection: Ideas
When we think about the present, we veer wildly between the belief in chance and the evidence in favour of determinism. When we think about the past, however, it seems obvious that everything happened in the way that it was intended.Collection: Past
I think that if writers don't speak about real life, it's because they don't know it.Collection: Real
When a country is strong... it accepts any dose of pessimism from its writers.Collection: Country
Rumor had it that he was homosexual; in reality, in recent years, he was simply a garden-variety alcoholic.Collection: Reality
In reality, the monotheist texts preach neither peace, love nor tolerance. They are texts of hate.Collection: Hate
As a teenager, Michel believed that suffering conferred dignity on a person. Now he had to admit that he had been wrong. What conferred dignity on people was television.Collection: Teenager
In my own writing, I think of myself as a realist who exaggerates a little.Collection: Writing
Using a big word like 'plagiarism'... always causes some damage. It will always do lasting damage, like accusations of racism.Collection: Racism
Polemical debates happen all the time in France.Collection: France
Father died last year. I don't subscribe to the theory by which we only become truly adult when our parents die; we never become truly adult.Collection: Father
Why am I popular? I don't know. Is it a mistake? I should think it's a mistake somewhere.Collection: Mistake
A source of permanent, accessible pleasure, our genitals exist. The god who created our misfortune, who made us short-lived, vain and cruel, has also provided this form of meagre compensation. If we couldn't have sex from time to time, what would life be? A futile struggle against joints that stiffen, caries that form. All of which, moreover, is as uninteresting as humanly possible - the collagen which makes muscles stiffen, the appearance of microbic cavities in the gums.Collection: Sex
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 eternityCollection: Loyalty
The most stupid religion is Islam.Collection: Stupid
To increase desires to an unbearable level whilst making the fulfillment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based.Collection: Desire
Now abideth beauty, truth, and intensity; but the greatest of these is intensity.Collection: Intensity