Top 120 Michel Houellebecq Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Anything can happen in life, especially nothing.”

— Michel Houellebecq

2. “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.”

— Michel Houellebecq

3. “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.”

— Michel Houellebecq

4. “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.”

— Michel Houellebecq

5. “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.”

— Michel Houellebecq

6. “People are suspicious of single men on vacation, after they get to a certain age: they assume that they’re selfish, and probably a bit pervy. I can’t say they’re wrong.”

— Michel Houellebecq

7. “The human race will disappear. Other races in turn will appear and disappear. The skies will be glacial and empty, traversed by the feeble light of half-dead stars. These too will disappear. Everything will disappear. And human actions are as free and as stripped of meaning as the unfettered movements of the elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, sentiments? Pure ‘Victorian fictions.’ All that exists is egotism. Cold, intact, and radiant.”

— Michel Houellebecq

8. “In order to pass the time I told him the story of the German who ate the other German whom he’d met on the internet.”

— Michel Houellebecq

9. “I prefer reading to writing. Reading changes your world view. Writing changes absolutely nothing. Except, of course, when it makes you rich.”

— Michel Houellebecq

10. “Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.”

— Michel Houellebecq

11. “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.”

— Michel Houellebecq

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

— Michel Houellebecq

13. “The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.”

— Michel Houellebecq

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

— Michel Houellebecq

15. “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.”

— Michel Houellebecq

16. “It may well be impossible for people who have lived and prospered under a given social system to imagine the point of view of those who feel it offers them nothing, and who can contemplate its destruction without any particular dismay.”

— Michel Houellebecq

17. “Not having anything around to read is dangerous: you have to content yourself with life itself, and that can lead you to take risks.”

— Michel Houellebecq

18. “The triumph of vegetation is total.”

— Michel Houellebecq

19. “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.”

— Michel Houellebecq

20. “The love of a dog is a pure thing. He gives you a trust which is total. You must not betray it.”

— Michel Houellebecq

21. “Active people don’t change the world profoundly; ideas do. Napoleon is less important in world history than Jean-Jacques Rousseau.”

— Michel Houellebecq

22. “One can say the West loved literature and the arts, but probably nothing counted more in its history than the need for rational certainty. To this need, the West sacrificed everything: its religion, its happiness, its hopes, and, when all is said and done, its existence.”

— Michel Houellebecq

23. “The outside world was harsh, merciless towards the weak, and hardly ever kept its promises, and love remained the only thing in which one could still, perhaps, have faith.”

— Michel Houellebecq

24. “If they can read in the eyes of a man an energy, a passion, then they find him attractive.”

— Michel Houellebecq

25. “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.”

— Michel Houellebecq

26. “My novels are all ideas.”

— Michel Houellebecq

27. “I think that if writers don’t speak about real life, it’s because they don’t know it.”

— Michel Houellebecq

28. “The press may hate me, and I know my battles with them are not over, but that doesn’t matter.”

— Michel Houellebecq

29. “The world outside had its own rules, and those rules were not human.”

— Michel Houellebecq

30. “Love binds, and it binds forever. Good binds while evil unravels. Separation is another word for evil; it is also another word for deceit.”

— Michel Houellebecq

31. “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.”

— Michel Houellebecq

32. “Tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is so hard to give up hope.”

— Michel Houellebecq

33. “So you’re for a return to patriarchy?” “You know I’m not for anything, but at least patriarchy existed. I mean, as a social system it was able to perpetuate itself. There were families with children, and most of them had children. In other words, it worked, whereas now there aren’t enough children, so we’re finished.”

— Michel Houellebecq

34. “We feel nostalgia for a place simply because we’ve lived there, whether we lived well or badly scarcely matters. The past is always beautiful. So, for that matter, is the future. Only the present hurts, and we carry it around like an abscess of suffering, our companion between two infinities of happiness and peace.”

— Michel Houellebecq

35. “I’d say that the question whether love still exists plays the same role in my novels as the question of God’s existence in Dostoevsky.”

— Michel Houellebecq

36. “There is no point in asking me general questions because I am always changing my mind.”

— Michel Houellebecq

37. “No one in the West will ever be happy again, she also thought, never again; happiness today is nothing but an old dream, the past conditions for its existence are simply no longer being fulfilled.”

— Michel Houellebecq

38. “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.”

— Michel Houellebecq

39. “[Removed] [Deleted]”

— Michel Houellebecq

40. “The society in which I live disgusts me; advertising sickens me; computers make me puke. My entire work as a computer expert consists of adding to the data, the cross-referencing, the criteria of rational decision-making. It has no meaning.”

— Michel Houellebecq

41. “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.”

— Michel Houellebecq

42. “Western nations took a strange pride in this system, though it amounted to little more than a power-sharing deal between two rival gangs, and they would even go to war to impose it on nations that failed to share their enthusiasm. Over.”

— Michel Houellebecq

43. “As I got older, I also found myself agreeing more with Nietzsche, as is no doubt inevitable once your plumbing starts to fail.”

— Michel Houellebecq

44. “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.”

— Michel Houellebecq

45. “Some people live to be seventy, sometimes eighty years old believing there is always something new just around the corner, as they say; in the end they practically have to be killed or at least reduced to a state of serious incapacity to get them to see reason.”

— Michel Houellebecq

46. “For the French, an intellectual didn’t have to be responsible. That wasn’t his job.”

— Michel Houellebecq

47. “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.”

— Michel Houellebecq

48. “Intimacy isn’t something men talk about.”

— Michel Houellebecq

49. “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?”

— Michel Houellebecq

50. “To love a book is, above all, to love its author: we want to meet him again, we want to spend our days with him.”

— Michel Houellebecq