Patrick Modiano Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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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.
Patrick Modiano
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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.
Patrick Modiano
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As a writer, one is always a little blind to what one writes.
Patrick Modiano
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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.
Patrick Modiano
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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.
Patrick Modiano
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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.
Patrick Modiano
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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?
Patrick Modiano
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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.
Patrick Modiano
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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.
Patrick Modiano
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Rue Froidevaux seemed to go on forever, as if the distances stretched to infinity.
Patrick Modiano
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That's the miracle of fiction. I use it to spray on certain moments or places from my youth.
Patrick Modiano
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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.
Patrick Modiano
