Top 35 Georges Simenon Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I am at home everywhere, and nowhere. I am never a stranger and I never quite belong.”

— Georges Simenon

2. “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.”

— Georges Simenon

3. “The lake and the mountains have become my landscape, my real world.”

— Georges Simenon

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

— Georges Simenon

5. “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.”

— Georges Simenon

6. “It was night and I could see a large and calm lake, reflecting the moon. Black mountains rose around it. I arrived from between two of these mountains, I looked at the lake and the moon, and that was it, nothing else happened.”

— Georges Simenon

7. “One of them, for example, which will probably haunt me more than any other is the problem of communication.”

— Georges Simenon

8. “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.”

— Georges Simenon

9. “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.”

— Georges Simenon

10. “He had read endless books, he had digested them, pondered over them. Day by day, year after year, he had turned over all the problems of human beings. Yet there were all sorts of simple things he didn’t know how to do: he couldn’t even walk into an inn and sit down at a table.”

— Georges Simenon

11. “If each one of us could make just one other happy, the whole world would know happiness.”

— Georges Simenon

12. “I would like to carve my novel in a piece of wood.”

— Georges Simenon

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

— Georges Simenon

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

— Georges Simenon

15. “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.”

— Georges Simenon

16. “I have made love to ten thousand women.”

— Georges Simenon

17. “The fact that we are I don’t know how many millions of people, yet communication, complete communication, is completely impossible between two of those people, is to me one of the biggest tragic themes in the world.”

— Georges Simenon

18. “Maigret had often tried to get other people, including men of experience, to admit that those who fall, especially those who have a morbid determination to descend ever lower, are almost always idealists.”

— Georges Simenon

19. “I write fast, because I have not the brains to write slow.”

— Georges Simenon

20. “I would like to carve my novel in a piece of wood. My characters – I would like to have them heavier, more three-dimensional... My characters have a profession, have characteristics; you know their age, their family situation, and everything. But I try to make each one of those characters heavy, like a statue, and to be the brother of everybody in the world.”

— Georges Simenon

21. “He distrusted ideas, as they were always too rigid to reflect reality, which, as he knew from experience, was very fluid.”

— Georges Simenon

22. “If I try to define my state as accurately as possible, I’d say that I possessed a warped lucidity. Reality existed around me, and I was in contact with it. I was aware of my actions.”

— Georges Simenon

23. “Human tragedies are always simple when we reconsider them in retrospect.”

— Georges Simenon

24. “And Boucard desisted, probably because like everyone else he was deeply impressed by this man who had laid all ghosts, who had lost all shadows, and who stared you in the eyes with cold serenity.”

— Georges Simenon

25. “If your vision of the world is of a certain kind you will put poetry in everything, necessarily.”

— Georges Simenon

26. “The poor are used to stifling any expression of their despair, because they must get on with life, with work, with the demands made of them day after day, hour after hour.”

— Georges Simenon

27. “There’s no skill and no grace to it, but you.”

— Georges Simenon

28. “I have always tried to write in a simple way, using down-to-earth and not abstract words.”

— Georges Simenon

29. “We’re a bit like criminal lawyers. We’re the public face of things, but it’s the civil lawyers who do the serious work, in the shadows.”

— Georges Simenon

30. “The inspector knew the mentality of malefactors, criminals and crooks. He knew that you always find some kind of passion at the root of it.”

— Georges Simenon

31. “I saw Mussolini tirelessly contemplate a parade of thousands of young men.”

— Georges Simenon

32. “She must have been pretty once. At least, like everyone, she had been young. Now her eyes, her mouth, her whole body exuded weakness. Could it be that she was ill and waiting for her next attack? Some people who know that at a particular hour they are going to start suffering again have that expression, subdued and yet tense, like drug addicts waiting for the hour of their dose.”

— Georges Simenon

33. “The weather was so contrary and fierce that the rain wasn’t mere rain or the wind freezing wind – this was a conspiracy of the elements.”

— Georges Simenon

34. “Aveva comunque il fascino di certi tisici: lineamenti delicati, pelle trasparente, labbra sensuali e insieme beffarde.”

— Georges Simenon

35. “Trotsky rises to give me his hand, then sits at his desk, gently allowing his regard to light on my person.”

— Georges Simenon

36. “You came to France to find out about our methods, and you will have observed that we don’t have any.”

— Georges Simenon

37. “Take trains, for instance. He was no longer a child, and it wasn’t anything mechanical about them that attracted him. If he had a preference for night trains, it was because he sensed in them something strange, almost wicked.”

— Georges Simenon

38. “Why, despite the blinding brightness, did everything look gray? It was as if the painfully sharp lights were helpless to dispel all the darkness the people had brought in from the night outside.”

— Georges Simenon