Art & Creativity Quote by Georges Simenon

Simenon’s “simple way” isn’t modesty; it’s a method of control. He’s staking out a craft position: language should behave like a clear window, not a stained-glass performance. The phrase “down-to-earth” signals allegiance to the street, the café, the cramped apartment - the lived textures where motives are messy and explanations are usually lies people tell themselves. By contrast, “abstract words” aren’t just difficult vocabulary; they’re alibis. Abstraction lets a writer float above consequence, labeling feelings instead of staging them, moralizing instead of observing.

The intent is almost journalistic: reduce the sentence until only the pressure points remain. That fits Simenon’s larger project, especially the Maigret novels and the romans durs, where the drama comes less from plot pyrotechnics than from atmosphere and human compromise. He wants you to feel the dampness of a canal, the stale heat of a bar, the small humiliations that push ordinary people toward bad decisions. Simple diction becomes an ethical stance: don’t decorate suffering, don’t intellectualize cruelty, don’t let style turn into a shield.

There’s also a quiet rebuke embedded here, aimed at literary prestige cultures that equate difficulty with depth. Simenon is arguing that clarity is not the enemy of complexity; it’s the delivery system. The leaner the language, the less room the reader has to admire the writing instead of confronting the person inside it.