” … I move continually in and out of sleep when I’m working. It’s as if sleep were a corridor to my imagination and my characters are at the end of that corridor. I used to be ashamed of my writing habits but then I realized that that was how I find my characters.”
From a Brigid Grauman Q&A with French author Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt in the April 24/25, 2010 issue of the Financial Times.