Quotes from Patrick Modiano

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.

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 erases the last one, leaving me with the impression that I have forgotten it.

On winning Literature Nobel Prize: I was actually in the street. Yes, I was in the street. It was my daughter who notified me.

I just have two daughters and a grandson. So not a big family.

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 jump in because the water is too cold.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

For a long time - and this particular time with greater force than usual - summer has been a season that gives me a sense of emptiness and absence, and takes me back to the past.

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.

When you really love someone, you must accept their part of mystery. And that's why you love them.

I always have the impression that I write the same book.

In the end, we are all determined by the place and the time in which we were born.

As a writer, one is always a little blind to what one writes.

I think I became a writer because I didn't know of anything else to do. Maybe some incident from my childhood influenced me.

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, never to give up.

A man without scenery is completely disarmed.

That's the miracle of fiction. I use it to spray on certain moments or places from my youth.

I noticed a phenomenon that doesn't often happen toa man: several women turned round as he passed them.

The more things remain obscure and mysterious, the more they interest me. I even try to find mystery in things that have none.

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.