Georges Simenon Quotes

• 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

  Character, Differences, Novel

  41 Copy quote

• I am at home everywhere, and nowhere. I am never a stranger and I never quite belong.

  Georges Simenon

  Home, Never Quit, Stranger

  23 Copy quote

• The lake and the mountains have become my landscape, my real world.

  Georges Simenon

  Nature, Real, Lakes

  48 Copy quote

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

  Georges Simenon

  Happiness, Justice, World

  19 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Water, Ink

  19 Copy quote

• For 30 years I have tried to make it understood that there are no criminals.

  Georges Simenon

  Years, Criminals, Understood

  17 Copy quote

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

  Georges Simenon

  Vision, World, Kind

  Carvel Emerson Collins, Georges Simenon (1956). “Georges Simenon: An Interview on the Art of Fiction”

  17 Copy quote

• A novelist is a man who doesn't like his mother.

  Georges Simenon

  Mother, Men, Novelists

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Brother, Character, Age

  16 Copy quote

• I write fast, because I have not the brains to write slow.

  Georges Simenon

  Writing, Brain

  13 Copy quote

• I adore life but I dont fear death. I just prefer to die as late as possible.

  Georges Simenon

  Fear Of Death, Late, Adore

  7 Copy quote

• Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don't think an artist can ever be happy.

  Georges Simenon

  Writing, Artist, Thinking

  Carvel Emerson Collins, Georges Simenon (1956). “Georges Simenon: An Interview on the Art of Fiction”

  16 Copy quote

• 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

  Communication, Two, People

  Carvel Emerson Collins, Georges Simenon (1956). “Georges Simenon: An Interview on the Art of Fiction”

  11 Copy quote

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

  Georges Simenon

  Writing, Simple, Earth

  15 Copy quote

• 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

  Eye, Men, Serenity

  9 Copy quote

• I have made love to ten thousand women.

  Georges Simenon

  Sex, Made, Thousand

  Quoted in L'Express, 21 Feb. 1977

  9 Copy quote

• We live in a time when writers do not always have barriers around them

  Georges Simenon

  Barriers

  Carvel Emerson Collins, Georges Simenon (1956). “Georges Simenon: An Interview on the Art of Fiction”

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Moon, Night, Lakes

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Long, Decision, Moments

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  New York, Night, Lazy

  7 Copy quote

• I would like to carve my novel in a piece of wood.

  Georges Simenon

  Sculpture, Pieces, Woods

  Carvel Emerson Collins, Georges Simenon (1956). “Georges Simenon: An Interview on the Art of Fiction”

  7 Copy quote

• I saw Mussolini tirelessly contemplate a parade of thousands of young men.

  Georges Simenon

  Men, Saws, Parades

  20 Copy quote

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

  Georges Simenon

  Light, Hands, Giving

  7 Copy quote

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

  Georges Simenon

  Communication, Example, Problem

  Carvel Emerson Collins, Georges Simenon (1956). “Georges Simenon: An Interview on the Art of Fiction”

  4 Copy quote

• Madame....gloatingly savored her words as earlier she had savored her pig's trotter.

  Georges Simenon

  Pigs

  4 Copy quote

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