Patrick Modiano

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

— Patrick Modiano

I write in the most classical French because this form is necessary for my novels: to translate the murky, floating, unsettling atmosphere…

— Patrick Modiano

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

— Patrick Modiano

Encourage aspiring writers to continue writing when things are going against them, when it feels hard. Explain the typical obstacles that occur,…

— Patrick Modiano

“For me the autumn has never been a sad season. The dead leaves and the increasingly shorter days have never suggested the…

— Patrick Modiano

Something happens between a novel and its reader which is similar to the process of developing photographs, the way they did it…

— Patrick Modiano

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

— 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.…

— Patrick Modiano

Really, I prefer not to read my early books. Not that I don't like them, but I don't recognize myself anymore, like…

— Patrick Modiano

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

— Patrick Modiano

A man without scenery is completely disarmed.

— Patrick Modiano

The more things remain obscure and mysterious, the more they interest me. I even try to find mystery in things that have…

— Patrick Modiano

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

— Patrick Modiano

I quickly realised that it is difficult to get started when writing a novel. You have this dream of what you want…

— Patrick Modiano

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

Writing is a strange and solitary activity. There are dispiriting times when you start working on the first few pages of a…

— Patrick Modiano

A novelist's lack of awareness of and critical distance to his own body of work is due to a phenomenon that I…

— Patrick Modiano

The doctor used to tell me that every person about to die becomes a music box playing the melody that best describes…

— Patrick Modiano

I've always had the wish, the nostalgia to be able to write detective novels. At heart, the principal themes of detective novels…

— 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…

— Patrick Modiano

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

— Patrick Modiano

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

— Patrick Modiano

Recently, I looked back at my first manuscripts and was struck by the lack of space, of breath. That's exactly how it…

— Patrick Modiano

When I was younger, I just put off the writing until later in the day, but now I write early every morning…

— Patrick Modiano

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

— Patrick Modiano