Herta Muller Quotes

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Herta Muller

Profession : Novelist

Birth : August 17, 1953

What can't be said can be written. Because writing is a silent act, a labor from the head to the hand.

Herta Muller

You can't build a future if you don't have a past.

Herta Muller

I have always written only for myself - to clarify things, to clarify things with myself, to understand in an inner way what is actually happening.

Herta Muller

We didn't have any books at home. Not even children's books or fairy tales. The only 'fantastic' stories came from religion class. And I took them all very literally, that God sees everything, and so I felt I was always being watched. Or that dead people were in Heaven right over our village.

Herta Muller

One is either destroyed by adapting or for refusing to.

Herta Muller

Anything in literature, including memory, is second-hand.

Herta Muller

Suffering doesn't improve human beings, does it?

Herta Muller

The more words we are allowed to take, the freer we become. If our mouth is banned, then we attempt to assert ourselves through gestures, even objects. They are more difficult to interpret, and take time before they arouse suspicion.

Herta Muller

If you live with death threats, you need friends. So you have to risk that they might spy on you.

Herta Muller

In writing, one searches, and that is what keeps one writing, that one sees and experiences things from another angle entirely; one experiences oneself during the process of writing.

Herta Muller

Writing itself does not know what it looks like while one is doing it, only when it's finished.

Herta Muller

In Romanian society, I am not particularly well-liked. I don't often receive invitations.

Herta Muller

I never wanted to be a writer.

Herta Muller

If, in the very first pages, I'm forced to read gratuitous phrases or banal metaphors, I won't be able to get inside the story. Only if the sentences 'sparkle' can I get hooked.

Herta Muller

I find any kind of 'organizing' very difficult. And that has irksome consequences when it comes to books, since I've often wound up buying books twice because I couldn't find what I already have in all my mess.

Herta Muller

My first book, 'Nadirs,' was very important for me. I'll leave its literary worth for others to judge. But its publication in Berlin in 1984 gave me protection. As did the awards it won. The Romanian secret police could no longer treat me and my friends as though we were completely cut off from the rest of the world. And we no longer felt cut off.

Herta Muller

Whatever I read went under my skin. I almost devoured the literature, which became like a road to discovery.

Herta Muller

I write in order to bear witness to life.

Herta Muller

I speak a kind of Hapsburg language.

Herta Muller

I learned Romanian very late, when I was fifteen, in town, and I wanted to learn it. I like the language very much.

Herta Muller