Patrick Modiano quotes:

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.

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. This creates a strong urge to go back and follow a different path. It is important not to give in to this urge but to keep going.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

No. She told me she was going to marry him, to get French nationality She was obsessed with getting a nationality

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

My wife's a lot younger than me thirty years difference You should never marry a woman a lot younger than you Never

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...

A man without scenery is completely disarmed.

But I am a patient man. I can wait for hours in the rain

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

My wife's a lot younger than me ... thirty years difference . . . You should never marry a woman a lot younger than you ... Never ...

Nice is a city of ghosts and specters, but I hope not to become one of them right away.

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