Top 28 Quotes & Sayings by Georges Simenon

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Belgian writer Georges Simenon.

Last updated on November 8, 2024.

Georges Joseph Christian Simenon was a Belgian writer. A prolific author who published nearly 500 novels and numerous short works, Simenon is best known as the creator of the fictional detective Jules Maigret.

Belgian - Writer | February 13, 1903 - September 4, 1989

Source: Wikipedia

I adore life but I don't fear death. I just prefer to die as late as possible.

Georges Simenon

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.

Georges Simenon

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

Georges Simenon

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

Georges Simenon

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

Georges Simenon

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.

Georges Simenon

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.

Georges Simenon

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

Georges Simenon

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.

Georges Simenon

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

Georges Simenon

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

Georges Simenon

Madame....gloatingly savored her words as earlier she had savored her pig's trotter.

Georges Simenon

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

Georges Simenon

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

Georges Simenon

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

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

Georges Simenon

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

Georges Simenon

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

Georges Simenon

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.

Georges Simenon

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

Georges Simenon

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.

Georges Simenon

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

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 calm and brutal indifference.

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 have made love to ten thousand women.

Georges Simenon

We live in a time when writers do not always have barriers around them

Georges Simenon