In 1975, after four successful novels at only just thirty, Patrick Modiano was already sufficiently famous to be asked about his reactions to celebrity:

Modiano's response is characteristic of him. He begins by ‘playing down’ the importance of the novel, arguing that it is a minor and anachronistic genre: how can novelists be famous, he asks, when so few people read novels? He thus shifts the focus of the question from the novelist to the novel, and avoids answering the interviewer's question directly. En se dé robant, like so many of his fictional narrators, he leaves behind the contradiction that he has just set up: if the novel is such a minor genre in the late twentieth century, how and why is he such a famous and successful novelist? For Modiano himself is living proof that it can be done, in spite of competition from ‘le cinéma et les moyens d'expression modernes’: Modiano the best-selling author, a household name in France.

In the 1975 interview with Ezine, there is another issue from which Modiano keeps his distance, that of experimental or self-conscious writing. ‘La littérature pour la littérature, les recherches sur l'écriture, tout ce byzantinisme pour chaires et colloques,’ he tells Ezine, ‘ça ne m'intéresse pas.’