All that would remain of me would be the raincoat I’d been wearing, rolled on a bench. - 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 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.

I've never been good at saying no.

Children are liable to expect more from life than their parents, and faced with adversity their reaction is more violent. They go farther, much farther than their parents, and, thereafter, their parents are unable to protect them.