Top 32 Best Modiano Quotes
#1. 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
#2. I always have the impression that I write the same book.
Patrick Modiano
#3. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. In the end, we are all determined by the place and the time in which we were born.
Patrick Modiano
#8. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. All those journeys, those countries where they had monsoons, earthquakes, amoebas and virgin forests, had lost their charm for me.
Patrick Modiano
#14. 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
#15. You were right to tell me that in life it is not the future which counts, but the past.
Patrick Modiano
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. People certainly lead compartmentalized lives and their friends do not know each other. It's unfortunate.
Patrick Modiano
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. That's the miracle of fiction. I use it to spray on certain moments or places from my youth.
Patrick Modiano
#30. When you really love someone, you must accept their part of mystery. And that's why you love them.
Patrick Modiano
#31. To quote Patrick Modiano, whom you you seem to like, in Villa Triste, 'There are mysterious beings, always the same, who watch over us at each crossroads in our lives.' Let's just say that, unintentionally, I have been one of those beings.
Antoine Laurain
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