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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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

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