Top 20 Quotes & Sayings by Amelie Nothomb

Luckily I haven't fallen into the trap, which has claimed so many writers, of living from day to day thinking 'Ah, I'll write a book about that.'

I will never be one of the happy stupid that were born somewhere. This way of life is excellent for the imagination. It develops your paranoia. You feel paranoid when you don't understand a country, and being paranoiac is excellent for fiction.

I never even dreamt of being a writer because I didn't feel allowed. When I was a child I was terribly ambitious, but I didn't know at all what this great thing would become.

More and more I understand that it's very fine not to know where you come from.

When you have a lot of success you don't need vanity any more.

I've noticed it a lot. I'm not someone who revises. It's always the first movement, it's that. It's an instinct. Either it works straight away, or it won't ever work.

I thought maybe I would become a god, or a goddess, or a president or a Nobel Prize winner.

When I want to be incognito, I don't wear any hat. Unfortunately, even without the hat, they now recognise me in Paris.

I eat in a strange way, but I enjoy it. Everything became well when I finally understood that I enjoy being hungry. Normally, I only eat in the evening.

I need to be very hungry all the time. I need to be very hungry to write.

It's while writing that suddenly a point of view appears: 'So, that's what I really thought about this thing'. Then it feels part of me.

The purpose of the photograph is to reveal the love that is felt in a single image.

If you admire yourself in the mirror, let it be in fear and not delight, because the only thing that beauty will bring to you is terror of losing it.

Of course you have memories, and these memories are convincing. But it's really at the moment when I write them down - when I write about my relationship with that Japanese boy in Ni d'Eve, Ni d'Adam - that they reach a degree of reality which is incandescent, that I've really conquered a story, understood it and feel that it is really part of me.

God isn't chocolate, he's the encounter between chocolate and the palate capable of appreciating it.

It’s true that someone will always say that good and evil don’t exist: that is a person who has never had any dealings with real evil. Good is far less convincing than evil, but it’s because their chemical structures are different. Like gold, good is never found in a pure state in nature: it therefore doesn’t seem impressive. It has the unfortunate tendency not to act; it prefers, passively, to be seen.

Definitely. More and more I understand that it's very fine not to know where you come from. There is line in a song by Georges Brassens [French singer-songwriter]: 'Les imbciles heureux qui sont ns quelquepart.' I will never be one of the happy stupid that were born somewhere. This way of life is excellent for the imagination. It develops your paranoia. You feel paranoid when you don't understand a country, and being paranoiac is excellent for fiction.

Une histoire d'amour dont les épisodes ont été mélangés par un fou

Because we don't have much time together, I will give you as much love in a year as I could give you in a lifetime.

Japanese women live in fear of making the least sound in a bathroom stall. Japanese men pay no attention to the subject whatsoever.