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.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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.

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.

I write in order to bear witness to life.

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.

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.

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.

My mother tongue is German.

Romanian is a very beautiful, sensual, poetic language.

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

Working with language requires beauty for me.

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

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

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

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 speak a kind of Hapsburg language.

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

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