Parenting & Family Quote by Georges Simenon

Simenon slips creation myth into domestic aside, and the effect is quietly ruthless: the detective is less a grand invention than a bundle of the author’s appetites, limitations, and evolving biography. “Of course” does a lot of work here. It frames pipe smoking not as a character detail but as an obvious, almost compulsory pleasure - a private vice upgraded into public texture. Calling those pleasures “ineffable” is sly, too: he can’t quite articulate why they matter, which is precisely why he gives them to the character. The pipe becomes shorthand for interiority, for a man who thinks slowly, sensually, and on his own schedule.

Then comes the most revealing admission: “And no children.” Not a moral stance, not a narrative decision, just a timestamp. Simenon treats character as a snapshot of authorial circumstance. The subtext is disarming: what we praise as psychological coherence is sometimes just the writer’s current life, not a master plan. It also hints at how fiction dodges responsibility. A childless protagonist is freer to roam, to obsess, to be consumed by cases - the plot’s needs masquerading as personality.

The final add-on, “a certain taste for food,” completes a portrait built from sensual anchors: smoke, appetite, bodily comfort. Simenon’s intent isn’t confessional so much as pragmatic. He’s describing a technique: give a character repeatable pleasures and you give readers a pulse, a recognizably human rhythm, the small satisfactions that make grim worlds livable. In a genre driven by crime, he foregrounds consumption and routine - the everyday as credibility engine.