Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We all have appointments with the past.
Time, that most abstract of humanity's homes.
And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.
Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything!
Everything our civilization has produced is entombed.
How far, in any case, must one go back to find the beginning?
I don't think one can write from a compromised moral position.
I came from anonymity, and I will continue to write as a private pursuit.
By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment
Men and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension.
It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.
At the time I could no more believe my eyes than now I can trust my memory.
... the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion.
Although I hold a German passport, I feel very much alienated when I'm there.
My father was not really a presence for me. He was away; he was in the German army.
I always read the translator's draft all the way through - a very laborious business.
We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that's performed upon it.
It must be extremely uncomfortable to live with a writer - all that preoccupation and brooding.
Places seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them.
A wonderful story collection set between one place and another and shaped by a fearless sense of comedy.
How I wished during those sleepless hours that I belonged to a different nation, or better still, to none at all.
Unlike Conrad or Nabokov, I didn't have circumstances which would have coerced me out of my native tongue altogether.
No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open.
A subject which at first glance seems quite removed from the undeclared concern of the book can encapsulate that concern.
We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.
Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers.
I've always been interested in photographs, collecting them not systematically but randomly. They get lost, then turn up again.
Only in the books written in earlier times did she sometimes think she found some faint idea of what it might be like to be alive.
In school I was in the dark room all the time, and I've always collected stray photographs; there's a great deal of memory in them.
Occasionally I write a small piece or the odd lecture in English, and I teach in English, but my fiction is always written in German.
Comparing oneself with one's fellow writers is a bad idea. I would not review a fellow writer unless I had something terribly positive to say.
Mine is a European imagination, shaped largely by my very promiscuous reading in German, French, English and, with greater difficulty, Italian.
There is something peculiarly dispriting about the emptiness that wells up when, in a strange city, one dials the same telephone numbers in vain.
A tight structural form opens possibilities. Take a pattern, an established model or sub-genre, and write to it. In writing, limitation gives freedom
Going home is not necessarily a wonderful experience. It always comes with a sense of loss and makes you so conscious of the inexorable passage of time.
My texts are written like palimpsests. They are written over and over again, until I feel that a kind of metaphysical meaning can be read through the writing.
I don't want to talk about my trials and tribulations. Once you reveal even part of what your real problems might be in life, they come back in a deformed way.
Up until the 17th century, Germany was far more advanced, but then everything devastated by the 30 Years War began to fall apart... The culture is not innocent.
People's ability to forget what they do not want to know, to overlook what is before their eyes, was seldom put to the test better than in Germany at that time.
If you're based in two places, on a bad day you see only the disadvantages everywhere. On a bad day, returning to Germany brings back all kinds of spectres from the past.
My parents came from working-class, small-peasant, farm-labourer backgrounds and had made the grade during the fascist years; my father came out of the army as a captain.
I believe that the black-and-white photograph, or rather the gray zones in the black-and-white photograph, stand for this territory that is located between life and death.
I was brought up largely by my grandfather because my father only returned from a prisoner-of-war camp in 1947 and worked in the nearest small town, so I hardly ever saw him.
Human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away.
The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives.
It would be presumptuous to say writing a book would be a sufficient gesture, but if people were more preoccupied with the past, maybe the events that overwhelm us would be fewer.
When I was a boy, I'd hide under the kitchen table and wind string around the chairs. I have a sense now that I am pulling on those threads. The more I pull, the more it comes unraveled.
Until I was 16 or 17, I had heard practically nothing about the history that preceded 1945. Only when we were 17 were we confronted with a documentary film of the opening of the Belsen camp.
I wonder now whether inner coldness and desolation may not be the pre-condition for making the world believe, by a kind of fraudulent showmanship, that one's own wretched heart is still aglow.
I have always kept ducks, even as a child, and the colours of their plumage, in particular the dark green and snow white, seemed to me the only possible answer to the questions that are on my mind.