At fifteen, he presented his first texts to Armand Salacrou, a French dramatist established in Le Havre, who encouraged him to pursue his efforts.

Le Havre, a heavily destroyed city during World War II and rebuilt in the structural classicism style will often reappear in Duteurtre's later works.

In 1979, Benoît Duteurtre studied for a month with György Ligeti, whose musical theory later had a strong influence in his life.

He sent this novel to Guy Debord, who returned a friendly letter with these words "Il vous a suffi de voir le même siècle et sa sorte d'art, vous l'avez ressenti justement"[1] (you only needed to see the same century and its kind of art, you felt it precisely).

A journalist for the well-known French newspaper Le Monde published an article comparing Duteurtre to Robert Faurisson, a revisionist.

Though the criticism of the work and the influence of Pierre Boulez as a composer is one of the main components of this essay, Duteurtre also put forward the problem of France's current nostalgia for its artistic leadership during the Belle Epoque in the late 19th-early 20th century.

In 1995, Marcel Landowski and Duteurtre created an association Musique Nouvelle en Liberté (New Music in Liberty) to promote new composers.

Milan Kundera was seduced and wrote a friendly article[3] which concurs with another fan of Duteurtre, Philippe Muray,[4] on important ideas about the role of a writer in the modern world.

Service Clientèle (2003) is a series of short chapters related to commercial or technical assistances of companies selling cellulars, flight tickets and Internet connexions.

[5] La Rebelle was published in 2004 and portrays a female TV show host, left-leaning but nevertheless careerist and the plot which involves her, a young Egypt-born gay computer engineer, an old swindler and a big French company CEO.

Duteurtre's novel Chemin de fer was published in 2006 and tells the story of a fifty-year-old woman divided between her career in Paris and her love for a small old-fashioned countryside house in the mountains.

He also wrote for the French literature magazine L'Atelier du Roman with authors like Milan Kundera and Michel Houellebecq.

Also published in 2007 "Ma belle époque", a collection of texts issued in different French newspapers, compose what Duteurtre thought to be like a self-portrait of himself.