280 Quotes by Michel Houellebecq

I don’t like this world. I definitely do not like it. The society in which I live disgusts me; advertising sickens me; computers make me puke.

No doubt the Romans had felt that theirs was an eternal civilization, right up to the moment their empire fell apart. Were they suicides, too?

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.

What was he doing? Reading a little, maybe. We can’t even be sure of this. In fact, his biographers have to admit they don’t know much at all, and that, judging from appearances – at least between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three – he did absolutely nothing.

People don’t really care all that much about their own death. What they really worry about, their one real fixation, is how to avoid physical suffering as much as possible.

In all of human history there may never have been a mind as brilliant as Isaac Newton’s – just think what an amazing, unheard-of intellectual effort it took to discover a single law that accounted for the fall of earthly bodies and the movement of the planets! Well, Newton believed in God.

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

While I was waiting to die, I still had the Journal of Nineteenth-Century Studies.

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.