Michael Haneke Quotes

We have a tendency to think of war as this quasi-mystical thing, and that interpretation flattens the experience - by using different perspectives, I wanted to open a place for readers to compare and contrast, to make judgments, to engage.

I don't think that writers have any responsibility to be good neighbors to the audience.

Your characters have to remain innocent of what your picture is after.

I just write the sort of book that I would enjoy reading myself, a book that is both scholarly and recreates the experience of people at that time.

Personal responsibility is not only recognizing the errors of our ways. Personal responsibility lies in our willingness and ability to correct those errors individually and collectively.

The first casualty when war comes is truth.

Rather than a teaching tool, I think a novel is more of a witnessing entity. A witnessing entity? What is that? I just want the reader to step in and experience it as a story.

I don't feel that as an artist my job is to offer PR propaganda, whether for the good or for the bad.

If I've vividly laid out the narrative, the reader will come to his own conclusions.

First of all there is always that artistic challenge of creating something. Or the particular experience to take slum life in that period and make something out of it in the form of a book. And then I felt some kind of responsibility to my family.

Naturally, the reader has access only to the events I show and the way I show them, but as has been said, there's generally a good deal of ambiguity in that presentation.

I never wanted to be a Cold War novelist.

Sure, I acted in films in the Third Reich, entertainment films, which distracted countless people inside and outside Germany from daily life during war.

With the war and everything that's going on, unless you're Susan Sarandon, the best route is to keep your mouth shut. For me it is, anyway!

Among the calamities of war, may he justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates, and credulity encourages.

There evolved a new media definition of civility that privileged "balance" over truth-telling—even when one side was lying. It's a real and profound change.

It is the aim of public life to arrange that all forms of power are entrusted, so far as possible, to men who effectively consent to be bound by the obligation towards all human beings which lies upon everyone, and who understand the obligation.

I don't start with a list of historical scenes that I want to include in the book. At a certain point, the narrative totally takes over, and everything that I include I can only incorporate if it answers to the internal terms of the novel.

If my own country is subverting the rule of law and sending its own citizens, its military, into harm's way on the basis of lies and propaganda, I would argue that being a patriot is calling out those lies and saying, 'No, you don't send our military into harm's way with no legal justification.'

One of the reasons why Gadafy's dictatorship has managed to remain in power for so long is not just because it has shown itself to be able to exact a great deal of violence, both psychological and physical, on its people, but because it has been very successful at imposing a narrative, a story.

The unfathomable isn’t something our media masters can tolerate. An unsurpassing self-assurance in their own moral and intellectual wisdom isn’t allowed to be punctured by the complex inexplicability of the real world. So to maintain the patina of omniscience they must fit the story into one of their narratives.

I don't believe in censorship, but I do believe that an artist has to take some moral responsibility for what he or she is putting out there.

Don't let them tell us stories.

There are two kinds of writer: those that make you think, and those that make you wonder.

Everyone is interesting except the narrator in a first-person story.