Michel Houellebecq Quotes

My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

I think I've written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action. I'm an introspective person.

I'm always saying that my books are not autobiographical because they're not. I can't choose any one scene and say, 'Oh, this is exactly what happened to me!' I just use little snippets of things as a starting point!

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

I try to write the kind of books I like to read.

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

I'm not the sort of writer who can walk into a party and take a look around, see who's sleeping with whom and go home and write a novel about society. It's not the way I work.

Most fiction comes from your experience.

Writers don't write about people they know. They write what they know about people.

A notion for a story is for me a confluence of real events, historical perhaps, or from my own memory to create an exciting fusion.

I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!

For me, inspiration isn't a sort of spark which lights the fire of the story. It's more like a thread, one of many, which you can tease out of a story once it's written, if you feel so inclined.

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.

Stories come to me and I don't know where they come from, but afterwards I can look back and say, 'Oh yes, that's got a little bit of me, or a little bit of my own son in it'. That's where ideas come from.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.

All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

I love telling stories. Creating a character, a world, a whole universe out of nothing. That part I can't get enough of.

Sometimes my lyrics may describe a situation that happened to a friend. Other times, I create a story from the ground up.

I love stories. I just enjoy telling stories and watching what these characters do - although writing continues to be just as hard as it always was.

It's been a while since I've written a novel aimed at the adult market, but I never sit down and say to myself, 'Okay, now I'm going to write something for us old folks.' I get gripped by an idea, and I go where the idea takes me.

Novels will remain my meat and potatoes, what sustain me imaginatively.