Patrick Modiano

“In big cities, in the summertime, people of long since lost track of each other or who don’t even know each other meet one evening on the terrace, and lose each other again. And none of it r...”

“The other day, I happened to walk through it. I had a strange sensation. Not that time had passed, but that another me, a twin, was prowling around there -- down to the smallest detail, and...”

“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 pr...”

“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...”

“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...”

“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 t...”

“Writing is a strange and solitary activity. There are dispiriting times when you start working on the first few pages of a novel. Every day, you have the feeling you are on the wrong track....”

“Recently, I looked back at my first manuscripts and was struck by the lack of space, of breath. That's exactly how it felt, back then... like I was suffocating.”

“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...”

“Encourage aspiring writers to continue writing when things are going against them, when it feels hard. Explain the typical obstacles that occur, and encourage and reassure them to continue,...”

“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 be...”

“A novelist can never be his own reader, except when he is ridding his manuscript of syntax errors, repetitions, or the occasional superfluous paragraph.”

“I quickly realised that it is difficult to get started when writing a novel. You have this dream of what you want to create, but it is like walking around a swimming pool and hesitating to j...”