68 Quotes by Georges Simenon

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.

I’m a bit like a sponge. When I’m not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little – and out comes, not water but ink.

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.

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

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.

A novelist is a man who doesn’t like his mother.

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.

He was a big, bony man. Iron muscles shaped his jacket sleeves and quickly wore through new trousers. He had a way of imposing himself just by standing there.

We live in a time when writers do not always have barriers around them.