Explore Quotes by Georges Simenon

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

I have made love to ten thousand women.

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

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

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

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 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.