Michel Houellebecq Quotes

I feel like this whole idea of wanting something that you don't really have is also very American in a way.

Now that we have everything we need, we discover that there is almost nothing that we have that we want

We grew up in a very material-lacking socialist society, but today China is a capitalist society. It's very materialistic. It's full of desire and luxury goods.

We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.

However much we might deplore the profit motive, or consumerist values, if everyone just wants i-Pods we would probably be better off than if they wanted class revolution.

Boredom is a fearsome prospect. There's a limit to the number of cars and microwaves you can buy. What do you do then?

The manufacture of desire isn't at the heart - if it isn't absurd to speak of a heart - of the media torrent. Chronic dissatisfaction is at the heart of the matter.

If I can't get the girl, at least give me more money.

Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.

Americans are fascinated by their own love of shopping. This does not make them unique. It's just that they have more to buy than most other people on the planet. And it's also an affirmation of faith in their country.

The folly of endless consumerism sends us on a wild goose-chase for happiness through materialism.

Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.

We think we have to work because the advertising industry has elevated wants into needs. The newspapers and the television batter us incessantly with the latest 'must-haves', whether that's shoes, videogames or patio heaters. As a result, mums think they 'have' to work at Tesco in order to buy expensive trainers.

Consumer society tantalises us. We then try within ourselves to control the needs that are being constantly stimulated.

By continually pushing the message that we have the right to gratification now, consumerism at its most expansive encouraged a demand for fulfillment that could not so easily be contained by products.

Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.

What Western society teaches us is that if you get enough money, power, and beautiful people to have sex with, that's going to bring you happiness. That's what every commercial, every magazine, music, movie teaches us. That's a fallacy.

I formulated the theme behind 'The Grand Illusion' album after observing how American culture creates illusions through advertising and entertainment to convince us that our lives our lacking, in order to sell products.

We always want more. Whether it is better clothes, a bigger house, faster cars, or the latest gadgets, satisfaction in these days of consumerism is difficult to find.

We've wanted to produce more in the 19th century and the 20th century in order to give man the possibility for more dignified human life; but actually what has happened is that production and consumption have become means - have ceased to be means and have become ends, and we are production crazy and consumption crazy.

No, I most certainly do not think advertising people are wonderful. I think they are horrible, and the worst menace to mankind, next to war; perhaps ahead of war. They stand for the material viewpoint, for the importance of possessions, of desire, of envy, of greed. And war comes from these things.

The great weakness of the West is that it has nothing with which to inspire loyalty except wealth. But what is wealth? Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not much to feed the spirit in all that.

It all looks American because America, the country that invented mass capitalism and consumerism, got there first. the impact of mass capitalism is now universal.

Our desires always increase with our possessions. The knowledge that something remains yet unenjoyed impairs our enjoyment of the good before us.

All of us experience the sad effects of blind submission to consumerism. In the first place it represents crass materialism. At the same time it represents a radical dissatisfaction because one quickly learns that the more one possesses, the more one wants, while deeper aspirations remain unsatisfied and perhaps even stifled.