Herta Muller Quotes

It was only against my mother's will that I attended the preparatory high school in the city. She wanted me to become a seamstress in the village. She knew that if I moved to the city, I would become corrupted. And I was. I started to read books.

- 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

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

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

Literature speaks with everyone individually - it is personal property that stays inside our heads. And nothing speaks to us as forcefully as a book, which expects nothing in return other than that we think and feel.

- Herta Muller

For me, each journey to Romania is also a journey into another time, in which I never knew which events in my life were coincidence and which were staged. This is why I have, in every public statement I have made, demanded access to the secret files kept on me which, under various pretexts, have invariably been denied me.

- 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

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

- Herta Muller

If I don't belong because of what I think and because of my opinions, then so be it. What can one do about it? One can't bend over backwards or pretend to be someone else just to belong. And in any case, it doesn't work. Once you no longer belong, it's over.

- 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

Working with language requires beauty for me.

- Herta Muller

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

- Herta Muller

Through writing, one experiences something different to what one experiences with the five senses one has because language is a different metier.

- 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

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

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

- 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

As a child, I perceived my mother as an old woman.

- Herta Muller

Romanian is a very beautiful, sensual, poetic language.

- Herta Muller

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

- Herta Muller

My mother tongue is German.

- Herta Muller

Ceausescu was mad, and he made half of Romania mad. I'm mad because of him.

- Herta Muller

I believe that literature always goes precisely there where the damage to a person has been done.

- Herta Muller

I speak a kind of Hapsburg language.

- Herta Muller

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

- 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

I am a broken person.

- Herta Muller

Happiness may perhaps be shared. But not luck, sadly.

- Herta Muller

Suffering doesn't improve human beings, does it?

- Herta Muller