104 Quotes by Patrick Modiano

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.