GEORGES SIMENON

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.

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

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.

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

I adore life but I don't fear death. I just prefer to die as late as possible.

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

I have made love to ten thousand women.

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

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.

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

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.