Herta Muller

“I speak a kind of Hapsburg language.”

“I never wanted to be a writer.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“Suffering doesn't improve human beings, does it?”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“I am a broken person.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Working with language requires beauty for me.”

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

“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.”

“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.”