I wasn't acting on passion. I was simply acting.

Writing a novel that works is an extremely difficult thing to do. It requires a level of skill and dedication that always surprises me.

If you come at movies with your own sense of morality and not your own sense of aesthetics, I think you're screwed. I think that's not a way to look at movies.

Greed is good. Sex is easy. Youth is forever.

And though the coldness I have always felt leaves me, the numbness doesn't and probably never will. this relationship will probably lead to nothing... this didn't change anything. I imagine her smelling clean, like tea.

I needed something--the distraction of another life--to alleviate fear.

Michel Houellebecq is the most interesting, provocative and important European novelist of my generation. Period. No one else comes close. He has written two or maybe three great books, and his latest, The Map and the Territory, is one of them.