Top 70 Patrick Modiano Quotes
#1. It's not a large crowd," he said, "and I have the feeling this wedding party is going to end in an orgy." He shrugged his shoulders.
Patrick Modiano
#2. 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
#4. When you really love someone, you must accept their part of mystery. And that's why you love them.
Patrick Modiano
#5. That's the miracle of fiction. I use it to spray on certain moments or places from my youth.
Patrick Modiano
#6. When he was younger, he used the slightest opportunity to slip away from people, without his being able to understand very clearly why he did so: a longing to break free and to breathe in the fresh air?
Patrick Modiano
#7. 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
#8. People certainly lead compartmentalized lives and their friends do not know each other. It's unfortunate.
Patrick Modiano
#9. 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.
Patrick Modiano
#10. Finally, the horizon stretched out infinitely before me and I felt utterly content looking at stars from afar and trying to make out all the variable, temporary, extinguished or faded stars. I was nothing in this infinity, but I could finally breathe.
Patrick Modiano
#11. In the end, we forget the details of our lives that embarrass us or are too painful. We just lie back and allow ourselves to float along calmly over the deep waters, with our eyes closed.
Patrick Modiano
#12. 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
#13. I recognized one of the qualities I most admired in my wife: the beautiful big handwriting of the illiterate that she was. Darling,
Patrick Modiano
#14. 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
#15. Without fully realizing it, I began writing my first book. It was neither a vocation nor a particular gift that pushed me to write, but quite simply the enigma posed by a man I had no chance of finding again, and by all those questions that would never have an answer.
Patrick Modiano
#16. Unless the line of a life, once it has reached its term, purges itself of all its useless and decorative elements. In which case, all that remains is the essential: the blanks, the silences and the pauses.
Patrick Modiano
#17. The doctor used to tell me that every person about to die becomes a music box playing the melody that best describes his life, his character, and his hopes. For some, it's a popular waltz; for others, a march.
Patrick Modiano
#18. Why do people whose existence you are unaware of, whom you meet once and will never see again, come to play, behind the scenes, an important role in your life?
Patrick Modiano
#19. You were right to tell me that in life it is not the future which counts, but the past.
Patrick Modiano
#20. 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
#21. All those journeys, those countries where they had monsoons, earthquakes, amoebas and virgin forests, had lost their charm for me.
Patrick Modiano
#22. Perhaps it was one of those mild, sunny winter days when you have a feeling of holiday and eternity-the illusory feeling that the course of time is suspended, and that you need only slip through this breach to escape the trap that is closing around you.
Patrick Modiano
#23. That is her secret. A poor and precious secret that not even the executioners, the decrees, the occupying authorities, the Depot, the barracks, the camps, History, time-everything that defiles and destroys you-have been able to take away from her.
Patrick Modiano
#26. 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.
Patrick Modiano
#27. In the end, we are all determined by the place and the time in which we were born.
Patrick Modiano
#28. 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
#29. Circumstances and settings are 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
#31. 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
#32. The more obscure and mysterious things remained, the more interested I became in them. I even looked for mystery where there was none.
Patrick Modiano
#33. Did you see her again in France?" I asked him."
"No. When I got to France, she was already dead. She committed suicide ..."
"Why?"
"She often told me she was frightened of getting old...
Patrick Modiano
#34. 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
#35. She had the right idea, old man, don't you think - to disappear before it gets too late?
Patrick Modiano
#36. 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.
Patrick Modiano
#38. My wife's a lot younger than me ... thirty years difference ... You should never marry a woman a lot younger than you ... Never ...
Patrick Modiano
#39. Life is completely different when you live near a railway station. It feels as if you're just passing through. Everything is temporary. One day or another, you'll hop on a train.
Patrick Modiano
#40. After all, the war doesn't alter my relationship with a blade of grass.
Patrick Modiano
#41. As a writer, one is always a little blind to what one writes.
Patrick Modiano
#42. I noticed a phenomenon that doesn't often happen to
a man: several women turned round as he passed them.
Patrick Modiano
#43. We discover, often too late to talk to him about it, an episode from his life that a loved one has concealed from you. Has he really hidden it from you? He has forgotten, or more likely, over time, he no longer thinks about it. Or, quite simply, he can't find the words.
Patrick Modiano
#44. Then she lowered her arm and the gate closed behind her. That arm suddenly falling and the metallic clank of the gate shutting made me understand that from one moment to another one can lose heart.
Patrick Modiano
#45. 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
#46. On the sidewalk, dead leaves. Or burned pages from an old Gaffiot dictionary. It's the neighborhood of colleges and convents.
Patrick Modiano
#47. 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
#48. But I am a patient man. I can wait for hours in the rain
Patrick Modiano
#49. In writing this book, I send out signals, like a lighthouse beacon in whose power to illuminate the darkness, alas, I have no faith. But I live in hope.
Patrick Modiano
#50. People don't come back any more. Haven't you noticed that, Monsieur?
Patrick Modiano
#51. A novelist can never be his own reader, except when he is ridding his manuscript of syntax errors, repetitions, or the occasional superfluous paragraph.
Patrick Modiano
#52. 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.
Patrick Modiano
#53. I just have two daughters and a grandson. So not a big family.
Patrick Modiano
#54. One should never expect anyone to reply to one's questions.
Patrick Modiano
#55. Something--he wondered later if it was simply his youth--something that had weighed upon him until that moment broke off him, the way a piece of rock slides slowly into the sea and disappears in a spray of foam.
Patrick Modiano
#56. No. She told me she was going to marry him, to get French nationality . . . She was obsessed with getting a nationality...
Patrick Modiano
#57. And then the next fifteen years fell apart: a few blurry faces, a few vague memories, ashes...
Patrick Modiano
#58. 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
#59. Many years afterwards, we attempt to solve puzzles that were not mysteries at the time and we try to decipher half-obliterated letters from a language that is too old and whose alphabet we don't even know.
Patrick Modiano
#60. "Do you often wear this dress?"
He pointed to the black satin dress with the two yellow swallows.
"I found it here when I rented the room. It must have belonged to the previous lodger."
"Or perhaps to you, in an earlier life."
Patrick Modiano
#61. Hutte was always saying that, in the end, we are all "beach men" and that "the sand"--I am quoting his own words-- keeps the traces of our footsteps only a few moment
Patrick Modiano
#62. And yet, from time to time, beneath this thick layer of amnesia, you can certainly sense something, an echo, distant, muted, but of what, precisely, it is impossible to say. Like finding yourself on the edge of a magnetic field, with no pendulum to pick up the radiation.
Patrick Modiano
#65. On winning Literature Nobel Prize: I was actually in the street. Yes, I was in the street. It was my daughter who notified me.
Patrick Modiano
#66. Someone had told him one day that you forget the voices of those whom you have been close to in the past very quickly.
Patrick Modiano
#67. On winter mornings when it's dark and the air is crisp, the lights are still shining and the first customers are gathered at the counter like conspirators. They give you the illusion that the day will be a new adventure. And that illusion stats with you for at least some of the morning.
Patrick Modiano
#68. How could the war have any semblance of reality when you found yourself sitting under a plane tree in a playground, in the provincial calm of an early afternoon?
Patrick Modiano
#69. Nice is a city of ghosts and specters, but I hope not to become one of them right away.
Patrick Modiano
#70. I always have the impression that I write the same book.
Patrick Modiano
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