Patrick Modiano Quotes
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I was responsible to no one, I had no need mumble excuses or lies. I would become someone else and my metamorphosis would be so complete that no one I’d met over the past fifteen years would be able to recognize me. (116)
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In the end, we are all determined by the place and the time in which we were born.
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I was always amazed when people were kind to us.
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The sign had been put up out of suspicion and a guilty conscience: 'Military zone. Filming or photography prohibited'.
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A novelist can never be his own reader, except when he is ridding his manuscript of syntax errors, repetitions, or the occasional superfluous paragraph.
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At the beginning, I experienced writing as a sort of constraint. Starting so young as a writer is pitiable: it's beyond your powers; you have to lay bare things that are very heavy, and you don't have the means for that.
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A novelist's lack of awareness of and critical distance to his own body of work is due to a phenomenon that I have noticed in myself and many others: as soon as it is written, every new book erases the last one, leaving me with the impression that I have forgotten it.
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Really, I prefer not to read my early books. Not that I don't like them, but I don't recognize myself anymore, like an old actor watching himself as a young leading man.
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As a writer, one is always a little blind to what one writes.
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When I was younger, I just put off the writing until later in the day, but now I write early every morning to get it done. I can only write for a few hours at a time; after that, my attention fades.
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I write in the most classical French because this form is necessary for my novels: to translate the murky, floating, unsettling atmosphere I wanted them to have, I had to discipline it into the clearest, most traditional language possible.
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Circumstance and settings are of no importance. One day this sense of emptiness and remorse submerges you. Then , like a tide, it ebbs and disappears. But in the end it returns in force, and she couldn’t shake it off. Nor could I?
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This feeling of not belonging to the same sensation which grips you in a dream, you find yourself walking through an unfamiliar district. On waking you realize, little by little, that the pattern of its streets had overlaid with the one with which, in day time, you are familiar.
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Something happens between a novel and its reader which is similar to the process of developing photographs, the way they did it before the digital age. The photograph, as it was printed in the darkroom, became visible bit by bit. As you read your way through a novel, the same chemical process takes place.
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Rue Froidevaux seemed to go on forever, as if the distances stretched to infinity.
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That's the miracle of fiction. I use it to spray on certain moments or places from my youth.
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I think I became a writer because I didn't know of anything else to do. Maybe some incident from my childhood influenced me.
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She committed suicide...'Why?''She often told me, she was frightened of getting old.'
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The more things remain obscure and mysterious, the more they interest me. I even try to find mystery in things that have none.
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For a long time, I've had a recurring dream - I dream I don't have to write any more, that I'm free. I'm not free, alas; I'm still clearing the same terrain, with the impression that it's never finished.
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I always have the impression that I write the same book.
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I often have the impression that the book I've just finished isn't satisfied: that it rejects me because I haven't successfully completed it. Because there is no going back, I'm forced to begin a new book so I can finally complete the previous one.
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A photograph can express silence.
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I've always had the wish, the nostalgia to be able to write detective novels. At heart, the principal themes of detective novels are close to the things that obsess me: disappearance, the problems of identity, amnesia, the return to an enigmatic past.