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

- Georges Simenon

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.

- Georges Simenon

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.

- Georges Simenon

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

- Georges Simenon

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

- Georges Simenon

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

- Georges Simenon

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

- Georges Simenon

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 …

- Georges Simenon

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

- Georges Simenon