Because I find writing painful, I try to get it over with as fast as possible. But I write every day, or I lose the thread. Patrick Modiano Read Quote
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. Patrick Modiano Read Quote
The more things remain obscure and mysterious, the more they interest me. I even try to find mystery in things that have none. Patrick Modiano Read Quote
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. Patrick Modiano Read Quote
That’s the miracle of fiction. I use it to spray on certain moments or places from my youth. Patrick Modiano Read Quote
In the end, we are all determined by the place and the time in which we were born. Patrick Modiano Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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. Patrick Modiano Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
