Michel Houellebecq

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

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

The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain.

Polemical debates happen all the time in France.

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.

You can't be a crazy rebel in the face of death, it's not a fitting attitude.