Houellebecq: "Those who think they know me are simply lacking in information."

Houellebecq: "A reactionary is someone who wants to return to a previous state - that's never a possibility in my books. For me, everything's irreversible in the life of a society, as well as an individual's."

Houellebecq: "There is no point in asking me general questions because I am always changing my mind."

Houellebecq: "I admit that invective is one of my pleasures. This only brings me problems in life, but that's it. I attack, I insult. I have a gift for that, for insults, for provocation. So I am tempted to use it."

Houellebecq: "The Americans are completely stupid. The intellectual level in any single European country is higher than in America."

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

Houellebecq: "The most stupid religion is Islam."

Houellebecq: "The dream of all men is to meet little sluts who are innocent but ready for all forms of depravity—which is what, more or less, all teenage girls are."

Houellebecq: "I think that if writers don't speak about real life, it's because they don't know it."

Houellebecq: "Women are not stupid, but they were not clever enough to realise that feminism did not bring freedom, but the opposite. That's why I'm glad feminism is dead."

Houellebecq: "My novels are all ideas."

Houellebecq: "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."

Houellebecq: "If life is an illusion it's a pretty painful one."

Houellebecq: "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."

Houellebecq: "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."

Houellebecq: "You know, you don't have to have permanent opinions. You can think, every morning, 'I love the world' and go to bed every night thinking, 'I hate the world.'"

Houellebecq: "In my own writing, I think of myself as a realist who exaggerates a little."