An entire life spent reading would have fulfilled my every desire; I already knew that at the age of seven. The texture of the world is painful, inadequate; unalterable, or so it seems to me. Really, I believe that an entire life spent reading would have suited me best.

— Michel Houellebecq

An entire life spent reading would have fulfilled my every desire; I already knew that at the age of seven. The texture of the world is painful, inadequate; unalterable, or so it seems to me. Really, I believe that an entire life spent reading would have suited me best. Such a life has not been granted me...

— Michel Houellebecq

Anything can happen in life, especially nothing.

— Michel Houellebecq

As I finished my rice, I sketched out the plot of a pornographic adventure film called The Massage Room. Siren, a young girl from northern Thailand, falls hopelessly in love with Bob, an American student who winds up in the massage parlor by accident, dragged there by his buddies after a fatefully boozy evening. Bob doesn't touch her, he's happy just to look at her with his lovely, pale-blue eyes and tell her about his hometown - in North Carolina, or somewhere like that. They see each other several more times, whenever Siren isn't working, but, sadly, Bob must leave to finish his senior year at Yale. Ellipsis. Siren waits expectantly while continuing to satisfy the needs of her numerous clients. Though pure at heart, she fervently jerks off and sucks paunchy, mustached Frenchmen (supporting role for Gerard Jug not), corpulent, bald Germans (supporting role for some German actor). Finally, Bob returns and tries to free her from her hell - but the Chinese mafia doesn't see things in quite the same light. Bob persuades the American ambassador and the president of some humanitarian organization opposed to the exploitation of young girls to intervene (supporting role for Jane Fonda). What with the Chinese mafia (hint at the Triads) and the collusion of Thai generals (political angle, appeal to democratic values), there would be a lot of fight scenes and chase sequences through the streets of Bangkok. At the end of the day, Bob carries her off. But in the penultimate scene, Siren gives, for the first time, an honest account of the extent of her sexual experience. All the cocks she has sucked as a humble massage parlor employee, she has sucked in the anticipation, in the hope of sucking Bob's cock, into which all the others were subsumed - well, I'd have to work on the dialogue. Cross-fade between the two rivers (the Chao Phrase, the Delaware). Closing credits. For the European market, I already had line in mind, along the lines of "If you liked The Music Room, you'll love The Massage Room.

— Michel Houellebecq

A woman is human, obviously, but she represents a slightly different kind of humanity.

— Michel Houellebecq

Contemporary consciousness is no longer equipped to deal with our mortality. Never in any other time, or any other civilization, have people thought so much or so constantly about aging. Each individual has a simple view of the future: a time will come when the sum of pleasures that life has left to offer is outweighed by the sum of pain (one can actually feel the meter ticking, and it always ticks in the same direction). This weighing up of pleasure and pain, which everyone is forced to make sooner or later, leads logically, at a certain age, to suicide.

— Michel Houellebecq

For myself, I wouldn't have lifted a finger to own a Rolex, a pair of Nike's or a BMW Z3; in fact, I had never succeeded in identifying the slightest difference between designer goods and non-designer goods. In the eyes of the world, I was clearly wrong. I was aware of this: I was in a minority, and consequently in the wrong. There had to be a difference between Yves Saint-Laurent shirts and other shirts, between Gucci moccasins and Andre moccasins. I was alone in not perceiving this difference; it was an infirmity which I could not cite as grounds for condemning the world. Does one ask a blind man to set himself up as an expert on post-impressionist painting? Through my blindness, however involuntary, I set myself apart from a living human reality powerful enough to incite both devotion and crime. These youths, through their half-savage instincts, undoubtedly discerned the presence of beauty; their desire was laudable, and perfectly in keeping with social norms; it was merely a question of rectifying the inappropriate way in which it was expressed.

— Michel Houellebecq

He doesn't know it yet, but the infinity of childhood is brief.

— Michel Houellebecq

He trusted that I would have a very pleasant stay: it was so peaceful, and the meals were delicious. As he said it, I realized that he was expressing not just a belief, but a hope, because he was one of those people, and you don't see them every day, who take an instinctive pleasure in the happiness of their fellow men – that he was, in other words, a nice guy.

— Michel Houellebecq

He was a kind of éminence grise, a political leader, in a clandestine movement. Everyone knows there are girls who go for that kind of thing. There are girls who go for Humanists, for that matter. I once met a girl -- a pretty, attractive girl -- who told me she fantasized about Jean-François Copé. It took me several days to get over it. Really, with girls today, all bets are off.

— Michel Houellebecq