Patrick Modiano Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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When I was around eight, I learned how to touch-type at school, and I received a computer as a present. I started writing plays, and for many years I thought I would be a playwright.
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You get on the radio by writing your own songs. But we had the dilemma of not being able to play anywhere because we weren't able to play anything that anyone wanted to hear. So we learned songs that we thought that we could do without puking.
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There's something different that happens when you're writing a song for your own record that you know you're going to sing.
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The correctness and quality of what you write do not matter; the act of writing does.
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Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.
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I have to write what I can write, and writing the text of a picture book is like walking a tightrope, if you ramble off... As my friend Julius Lester says, 'A picture book is the essence of an experience.'
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Writing about a person whose struggle you wish you could solve is an act of compassion and also, frankly, opportunism.
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I love writing two narratives! I think concurrent storylines are my favorite way to write a book.
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Whatever's going on with me at the time of writing is going to find its way into the piece. If that doesn't happen, then what the hell am I doing? So if I'm writing 'Inglourious Basterds,' and I'm in love with a girl and we break up, that's going to find its way into the piece.
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For me, writing is such an escape, and I felt very lucky to have this to run away to.
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I love playing in Germany. I love playing anywhere where people are going to enjoy the music. Germany is especially nice to play.
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Writing is a form of licensed madness.
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When writers stop to sharpen pencils or get up and make coffee to procrastinate, they still stay in their heads with their characters. But when you zip over to read email or check your Facebook page, you get zapped out of the fictive dream. It's brutal on my writing.
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I gave up writing children's books. I wanted to escape from them as I had once wanted to escape from 'Punch': as I have always wanted to escape. In vain.
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When I'm writing, I look like a fool because the parts are moving through me and I'm crying and laughing and making faces.
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God save us from people who do the morally right thing. It's always the rest of us who get broken in half.
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I wrote a great deal about the Civil Rights Movement when I was writing for 'The Nation' in the '60s, and also for Esquire magazine. Reading the biography of Coffin, it just reminded me that in those days, when you saw the term 'Christian,' it usually meant people for civil rights and for justice.
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R&B is the one thing that has influenced every kind of music. Every artist that there is, from those that are sung the most to Adele - you know, she was so influenced by so many R&B artists and soul music - it's clear in her writing that that's where it comes from.
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I didn't necessarily intend it for myself, but it just happens with Instagram and Twitter; people come up to me and call me Emrata; they don't call me Emily. That's my brand, my identity.
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I had really specific ideas of what kind of mom I was going to be and what kind of things I was going to provide for my child - even down to the organic, wooden toys Birdie was going to be allowed to chew on. Then cut to my daughter being obsessed with every plastic, 99-cent store toy.
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Freddie Mercury, to me, was probably the most important frontman to me growing up.
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I tell everybody, 'If you want to get to know me, if you listen to those three records, you'll have a really good idea.' They were released at different time periods in my life, and those are the things I was going through.
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The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet.
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Writing is a strange and solitary activity.
