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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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