When you have a lot of success you don't need vanity any more.
Amelie Nothomb
I thought maybe I would become a god, or a goddess, or a president or a Nobel Prize winner.
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.'
When I want to be incognito, I don't wear any hat. Unfortunately, even without the hat, they now recognise me in Paris.
More and more I understand that it's very fine not to know where you come from.
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.
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.
I need to be very hungry all the time. I need to be very hungry to write.
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 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 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.
