A biography for Herta Mullerhasn’t been written yet.
“My mother tongue is German.”
“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.”
“One is either destroyed by adapting or for refusing to.”
“Writing itself does not know what it looks like while one is doing it, only when it's finished.”
“Ceausescu was mad, and he made half of Romania mad. I'm mad because of him.”
“I write in order to bear witness to life.”
“You can't build a future if you don't have a past.”
“Romanian is a very beautiful, sensual, poetic language.”
“In Romanian society, I am not particularly well-liked. I don't often receive invitations.”
“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.”
“Through writing, one experiences something different to what one experiences with the five senses one has because language is a different metier.”
“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.”
“I learned Romanian very late, when I was fifteen, in town, and I wanted to learn it. I like the language very much.”