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" 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. "

Herta Muller

City

School

Mother

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

Herta Muller

Time

My Life

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

" 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. "

" Ceausescu was mad, and he made half of Romania mad. I'm mad because of him. "

" 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. "

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

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

" Anything in literature, including memory, is second-hand. "

" One is either destroyed by adapting or for refusing to. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Working with language requires beauty for me. "

" I speak a kind of Hapsburg language. "

" Romanian is a very beautiful, sensual, poetic language. "

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

" 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. "

" I am a broken person. "

Herta Muller

Person

I Am

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

" I never wanted to be a writer. "

" Suffering doesn't improve human beings, does it? "

" 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. "

" 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 write in order to bear witness to life. "

" 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. "

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

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