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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All writing is that structure of revelation. There's something you want to find out. If you know everything up front in the beginning, you really don't need to read further if there's nothing else to find out.
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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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I wasn't one of those kids who grew up wanting to write or who read a particular book and thought: 'I want to do that!' I always told stories and wrote them down, but I never thought writing was a career path, even though, clearly, someone was writing the books and newspapers and magazines.
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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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Writing is agony. I hate it.
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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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When I hear a great new record, especially when it's by someone that I respect and admire, then a part of me is like, Why didn't I think of that? Why didn't I write that record? It makes you sick, but in a way it can be a great thing. It makes you want to go back to the lab and start writing again. Maybe it will inspire you to try a little harder.
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I am consistently impressed by reddit. I'd say on a near weekly basis, by little things. Whether it's - I absolutely love seeing the Photoshop jobs that people do. Not of silly cats, but of redditors who are like, 'I have this photo of like my mom. This is the last photo I took with her. She was in the hospital. Can any of you clean this photo up?'
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Think of the first Apple II being shipped in 1977. It took almost a decade for it to land in my school where I could see it.
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I can always tell when a filmmaker doesn't care about his or her characters; they just care about setting them up to kill them off.
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I'd rather not think about the unpleasant side of the experience. 'Bigg Boss' is the biggest reality-show in India and perhaps in the world. I went into it on a clean slate.
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Writing is a strange and solitary activity.
