“People often say that the English are very cold fish, very reserved, that they have a way of looking at things – even tragedy – with a sense of irony. There’s some truth in it; it’s pretty stupid of them, though. Humor won’t save you; it doesn’t really do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn’t matter how brave you are, how reserved, or how much you’ve developed a sense of humor, you still end up with your heart broken. That’s when you stop laughing. In the end there’s just the cold, the silence and the loneliness. In the end, there’s only death.”

“Women are not stupid, but they were not clever enough to realise that feminism did not bring freedom, but the opposite. That's why I'm glad feminism is dead.”

“The most stupid religion is Islam.”

“I tend to think that good and evil exist and that the quantity in each of us is unchangeable. The moral character of people is set, fixed until death.”

“The love of a dog is a pure thing. He gives you a trust which is total. You must not betray it.”

“You can't be a crazy rebel in the face of death, it's not a fitting attitude.”

“I am persuaded that feminism is not at the root of political correctness. The actual source is much nastier and dares not speak its name, which is simply hatred for old people. The question of domination between men and women is relatively secondary—important but still secondary—compared to what I tried to capture in this novel, which is that we are now trapped in a world of kids. Old kids. The disappearance of patrimonial transmission means that an old guy today is just a useless ruin. The thing we value most of all is youth, which means that life automatically becomes depressing, because life consists, on the whole, of getting old.”

“If you control the children, you control the future.”

“The map is more interesting than the territory.”

“The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.”

“What about you, Michel, what are you going to do here?'The response closest to the truth was probably something like 'Nothing'; but it's always difficult to explain that kind of thing to an active person.”