Amelie Nothomb Quotes

I couldn't say who I am, I haven't the remotest notion of myself; I am someone without antecedents, without a history, without a country, and on that I insist!

In England I am not English, in India I am not Indian. I am chained to the 1,000 square miles that is Trinidad; but I will evade that fate yet.

What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.

Part of the very impulse of writing for me is actually wanting to get away from myself.

I have my husband and children near me in Rome, and I feel this is where we are temporarily belonging. But personally, all my life, I have felt the absence of a sense of history.

The country in which I live is not my native country, that lies elsewhere, and it must always be the center of my longings.

A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the mud, uncles' and cousins' books, tablets and capsules and powders...and then one day you find yourself leaning here, writing on that round glass table salvaged from the Park View Pharmacy--writing this, an impossibility, a summary of who you came to be where you are now, and where, God knows, is that?

It took me many years to understand that my identity is more Israeli than Jewish.

When I was growing up, I never felt that I belonged anywhere because we never lived in a house for more than three months. That's all I knew, and that's why I don't really belong anywhere.

We are already so many things by the time we reach the middle of life that it is possible to see that really anything can happen, and that, by extension, anything is doable. I decided I'd write 'The Calling' as someone else. Another writer entirely, a fictional one who would be played by me.

It's fun to be someone else.

Maybe I am not French, maybe I am from nowhere.

I don't know about relationships. Maybe I'm supposed to travel and make films and meet people and have adventures instead.

When you sit at your desk, if you're lucky, there's a moment when you feel empowered to be someone or something else, to leap into another skin.

Music is supposed to be an escape. It's supposed to be somewhere you go, where you can be yourself, or be whatever you want to be.

Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.

Life is not an exact science, it is an art.

I do not feel an exile from America in any sense.

Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.

It's strange; when I was younger and people would ask, 'Where are you from?', I'd say, 'West Africa', which was odd because I'm obviously not African, but it was my home.

I am a member of the Muskogee people. I'm a poet, a musician, a dreamer of sorts, a questioner. Like everyone else, I'm looking for answers of some sort or the other.

I write because I have always been curious about what it would feel like to be someone else, in a different situation. Fiction is a wonderful way of exploring that.

Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.

It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.

As long as I can wear a wig I can be any character, and in real life I can be myself.