Patrick Modiano Quotes

He thought a photograph was nothing; that he should blend into the surroundings and become invisible, the better to work and capture –as he said natural light. One shouldn’t even hear the click of Rolleiflex. He would have liked to conceal his camera. The death of his friend Robert Capa could in fact be explained, as he saw it, by this desire, the giddiness of blending into the surrounding once and for all.

Has a biographer the right to suppress certain details under the pretext that he considers them superfluous? Or do they all have their importance, and must he present them one after the other, impartially, so that not a single one is left out, as in the inventory of a distraint? Unless the line of 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.

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. I thought I was writing books one after the other in a disjointed way, in successive bouts of oblivion, but often the same faces, the same names, the same places, the same phrases keep coming back in book after book, like patterns on a tapestry woven while half asleep. While half asleep or while daydreaming. A novelist is often a sleepwalker, so steeped is he in what he must write, and it is natural to worry when he crosses the road in case he is run over. Do not forget, though, the extreme precision of sleepwalkers who walk over roofs without ever falling off.

When you are young , you neglect certain details that might become precious later.

There are moments when we are incapable of exchanging a single word with anybody…it’s beyond us…

Like many writers before me, I believe in coincidence and, sometimes, in the novelist’s gift for clairvoyance- the word gift not being the right one, for it implies a kind of superiority. Clairvoyance is simply the part of profession: the essential leaps of imagination, the need to fix one’s mind on detail-to the point of obsession, in fact, so as not to lose the thread and to give in one’s natural laziness. All the, is tension, this cerebral exercise may well lead in the long run to “flashes of intuition concerning events past and future” , as defined by Larousse dictionary under “clairvoyance”.

Then again, the term “Jew” meant nothing to the fourteen-year-old Dora. When it came down to it, what did people understand by the term “Jew”? For himself, he never gave it a thought. He was used to being put into this or that category by the authorities. Unskilled labourer. Ex –Austrian. French legionnaire. Non- suspect. Ex-serviceman 100% disabled. Foreign statute labourer. Jew.

A novelist has more talent for written than oral assignments.

I shall never know how she spent her days, where she hid, in whose company she passed the winter months of her first escape, or the few weeks of spring when she escaped for the second time. That is her secret. A poor and precious secret which not even the executioners the decrees, the occupying authorities, the Depot, the barracks, the camps, history, time – everything that corrupts and destroys you- have been able to take away from her.

But I wasn’t quite sure how to spell ‘ Cartaud, and I found listings for Cartau, Cartaud , Cartault , Cartaux, Carteau, Carteaud, Carteaux, (34 )

You should never marry a lot younger than you...never....it never works ...there is not a single case of its working..

Perhaps it was one of those mild, sunny winter days when you have a feeling of holiday and eternity- the illusion that passage of time is suspended, and that you need only slip through this breach to escape the trap which is closing around you.

With the passing of the years, each neighbourhood, each street in a city evokes a memory, a meeting, a regret, a moment of happiness for those who were born there and have lived there. Often the same street is tied up with successive memories, to the extent that the topography of a city becomes your whole life, called to mind in successive layers as if you could decipher the writings superimposed on a palimpsest. And also the lives of the thousands upon thousands of other, unknown, people passing by on the street or in the Métro passageways at rush hour.

Ever since my childhood, I had seen my father carrying so many bags- suitcases with false bottoms , leather satchels or overnight bags, even those black briefcases that gave him a false air of repectability…. And I never knew just what was in them. ( 52 )

I've never been good at saying no.