Has a biographer the right to suppress certain details under the pretext that he considers them superfluous? Or do they all have their importance, an… - Patrick Modiano

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

I was responsible to no one, I had no need mumble excuses or lies. I would become someone else and my metamorphosis would be so complete that no one I’d met over the past fifteen years would be able to recognize me. (116)

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.