280 Quotes by Michel Houellebecq

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.

I’d feel kind of like a rat abandoning ship.” “Rats are intelligent mammals,” he answered calmly, almost with amusement. “They will probably outlive us. Their society, at any rate, is a good deal more stable than ours.

There was no way I could think it over without a second Calvados. After thinking it over, I decided that the really prudent thing was to go out and buy another bottle.

The greater the proportion of pure morality in a particular system, the happier and more enduring the society.

Bloy was the ultimate weapon against the twentieth century, its mediocrity, its moronic ‘engagement,’ its cloying humanitarianism; against Sartre, and Camus, and all their political playacting; and against all those sickening formalists, the nouveau roman, the pointless absurdity of it all.

If life is an illusion it’s a pretty painful one.

Life begins at fifty, that’s true, inasmuch as it ends at forty.

The academic study of literature leads basically nowhere, as we all know, unless you happen to be an especially gifted student, in which case it prepares you for a career teaching the academic study of literature – it is, in other words, a rather farcical system that exists solely to replicate itself and yet manages to fail more than 95 percent of the time.

What’s amazing about Bayrou, what makes him irreplaceable,” Tanneur enthused, “is that he’s an utter moron.