Michel Houellebecq Quotes

Nations need to understand their own strengths and weaknesses, and India's tradition of dissent and democratic debate is a positive aspect.

I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

We are a small nation, but strong.

Being able to provoke a different point of view to the standard current ideological or political perspective as played out in conventional newspaper or radio reportage is what a public intellectual does. But it's not merely about being oppositional, because that's too negative.

Our position is extremely perilous; if we do not earnestly promote nationalism and weld together our four hundred millions into a strong nation, we face a tragedy - the loss of our country and the destruction of our race. To ward off this danger, we must espouse nationalism and employ the national spirit to save the country.

It is a commonplace to say that novelists should be judged by their work rather than their private lives or their publicly expressed views. And writers, of course, subscribe enthusiastically to this idea.

My first task is to show how great we are as a nation - let's banish the pessimists.

I love this country. And when you are given an opportunity to help your country, in what is one of the most volatile times we've seen in a long time, there's no way I'm not going to step up to do everything I can and make us strong.

Garrett," said Stendahl, "do you know why I've done this to you? Because you burned Mr. Poe's books without really reading them. You took other people's advice that they needed burning. Otherwise you'd have realized what I was going to do to you when we came down here a moment ago. Ignorance is fatal, Mr. Garrett.

I discovered very quickly that criticism is a form of optimism, and that when you are silent about the shortcomings of your society, you're very pessimistic about that society. And it's only when you speak truthfully about it that you show your faith in that society.

Ill writers are usually the sharpest censors.

There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times.

There's nothing political about American literature.

If you do not like anything in a particular book, then sit and discuss it. Banning a book is not a solution. We have to tackle it ideologically.

If there was ever a dissenter from the national optimismit was surely Edgar Allan Poe--without question the bravest and mostoriginal, if perhaps also the least orderly and judicious, of all the critics that we have produced.

It is by no means necessary that a great nation should always stand at the heroic level. But no nation has the root of greatness in it unless in time of need it can rise to the heroic mood.

I'm not sure I'm happy with words such as "task" or "role" when they are attached to literature.

To think, analyze and invent, he [Pierre Menard] also wrote me, “are not anomalous acts, but the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occasional fulfillment of this function, to treasure ancient thoughts of others, to remember with incredulous amazement that the doctor universal is thought, is to confess our languor or barbarism. Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he will be." (Jorge Luis Borges, "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote, 1939)

I believe in choosing the hardest book imaginable. I believe in reading up on what others have to say about this difficult book, and then making up my own mind.

[Cultural relativism] licenses the envy of the untalented, giving rise to what has been called the revenge of failure: Those who cannot paint destroy the canons of painting; those who cannot write reject canonical literature.

Poets are political, they have to be reflections of their times [because] they're living in their times... Poetry is political in that it's standing in opposition to fascism. Good poetry asks a bunch of questions and asks the audience to interact with themselves or see themselves in it; maybe you like it or you don't like it. But the fascist sort of stuff plays on your fears and tells you to jump on the party line and gives some simple excuses - blame this person.

Not gold but only men can makeA people great and strong;Men who for truth and honors sakeStand fast and suffer long. Brave men who work while others sleep,Who dare while others flyThey build a nations pillars deepAnd lift them to the sky.

More and more it seems to me that the philosopher, being of necessity a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself, and had to find himself, in contradiction to his today: his enemy was ever the ideal of today. So far all these extraordinary furtherers of men whom one calls philosophers, though they themselves have rarely felt like friends of wisdom but rather like disagreeable fools and dangerous question marks, have found their task, their hard, unwanted, inescapable task, but eventually also the greatness of their task, in being the bad conscience of their time.

Like Richard Ellmann on James Joyce, Arnold Rampersad on Ralph Ellison is in a class of its own. His masterful and magisterial book is the most powerful and profound treatment of Ellison's undeniable artistic genius, deep personal flaws, and controversial political evolution. And he reveals an Ellison unbeknownst to all of us. From now on, all serious scholarship on Ellison must begin with Rampersad's instant and inimitable classic in literary biography.