Georges Simenon Quotes (7 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Georges Simenon: 7 quotes 0 likes

Famous Georges Simenon Quotes

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

Georges Simenon

Interviewed in Paris Review, Summer 1955; reprinted in Malcolm Cowley (ed.) Writers at Work (New York: Viking Press, 1959) p. 146.

“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

“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 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

Source: Three Bedrooms in Manhattan

“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

Interviewed in Paris Review, Summer 1955; reprinted in Malcolm Cowley (ed.) Writers at Work (New York: Viking Press, 1959) p. 153.

“You know, Fellini, I believe that, in my life, I have been more Casanova than you. I made the calculation a year or so ago that I have had 10,000 women since the age of thirteen and a half. It wasn't at all a vice. I have not the slightest sexual vice, but I have the need to communicate.”

Georges Simenon

Fellini, je crois que, dans ma vie, j'ai été plus Casanova que vous! J'ai fait le calcul, il ya un an ou deux. J’ai eu dix mille femmes depuis l’âge de treize ans et demi. Ce n’ést pas du tout un vice. Je n’ai aucun vice sexuel, mais j’avais besoin de communiquer.
Interviewed by Federico Fellini in L'Express, February 21, 1977, and cited from Daniel Golay et al. Simenon, un autre regard (Lausanne: L'Hebdo, 1988) p. 104; translation from Fenton Bresler The Mystery of Georges Simenon (London: Heinemann, 1983) p. 239.

“I never read contemporary fiction – with one exception: the works of Simenon concerned with Inspector Maigret.”

Georges Simenon

T. S. Eliot in the Sunday Times, 1952; cited from David Chinitz T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) p. 56
Criticism