A Quote by 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 me. — © 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 me.
I just don't really listen to music. I'm probably missing out, but I don't want to know what everybody else is doing. Nobody is strong enough to not be influenced. And I don't mean influenced by copying - I'd be influenced because I wouldn't want to do what someone else is doing. I want to be able to do whatever I feel like doing and not worry about anything.
People gather details and comparisons but it doesn't really bother me or land on me of any sort. I don't know if I was... Maybe I was influenced by them, maybe I wasn't, but I don't know. I was probably influenced by everything I've heard. So it doesn't bother me at all, but it doesn't sway me either.
I became a writer not because my father was one - my father made false teeth for a living. I became a writer because the Irish nuns who educated me taught me something about bravery with their willingness to give so much to me.
I know so many people think my music is quite influenced by Animal Collective, but honestly I think maybe the factor is that we're both influenced by the same stuff.
People have asked me throughout the years which directors have influenced me. I don't know their names, because I was mostly influenced when I'd see a film and think, "Man, I want to be sure to never do anything like that." So I never learned their names. It wasn't a matter of copying or emulating somebody I admired. It was getting rid of a lot of stuff.
Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.
Everyone who knew me as a child, they say they're not surprised that I became a writer because I wrote all the time. I don't remember writing, because I wouldn't have had the tools, but I think what they are saying is that I would pretend I was a writer.
You know, artists are influenced by other artists. We're all deeply influenced by what's around us; we don't make anything cold. Sometimes we think that we do. But within that, the most important part is that even though we're influenced, what are the levels of invention that we carry forth even as we've been influenced by something that's come before?
I'm not scared anymore, I just ... I don't know. I think it's because I saw someone else, someone behind your face, like you'd taken off a mask. It was still you, but it wasn't. And I don't think that person is going to hurt me, or Marci, or anybody else, but ... I guess the thing is that I don't know anything about that person. At all. And that's what scares me more than anything - that there could be two people, so different, and one of them so secret.
Gaga and Stefani are my nicknames. I guess when people meet me for the first time and call me Stefani, it bothers me. Because it's something that's reserved for only the people who are closest to me. It's not because I don't like my given name; it's that I became somebody else. I became somebody else for a reason, you know. This is part of what my message is - you can become whoever you want to be, to escape your past.
I was very influenced by films and books like 'Serpico,' 'The French Connection,' and 'Prince of the City.' They were some of the reasons I became a crime writer.
Sometimes I felt as a writer I was purging, and it almost hurt to purge to that level. Now it doesn't feel that way, maybe because I'm older. Maybe life has given me some punches, but it didn't knock me down.
They say that to be a writer you must first have an unhappy childhood. I don't know if unhappiness is necessary, but I think maybe some children who have suffered a loss too great for words grow up into writers who are always trying to find those words, trying to find a meaning for the way they have lived
I think people are intimidated by grilling .. maybe it's the flame, maybe it's the big grills, maybe they've had some bad childhood experiences .. but I think that grilling is actually the easiest technique in cooking.
One thing I'd do was put a great writer's book beside the typewriter and... type out a beautiful and moving paragraph... and see those sentences rising up... and... think, 'Someday maybe I can write like that....' It was like a dream of possibilities for my own self. And maybe I began to know that there was no other way for the sentence... to... arouse the same feeling. The someone writing whose words were rising from the typewriter became like a mentor for me.... You shouldn't do it more than a few times because you must get on with your own work.
It seems natural to me that as a writer, you should have some kind of, you know, there should be some kind of projection that you actually have influenced people who are closest to you.
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