Peter Handke
The most real dialogue for me is when I am alone, writing.Collection: Alone
We behave as if being alone were a problem.Collection: Alone
Samuel Beckett. He is a kind of hero for me.
I'm not a winner. My nature is not the nature of a winner.
Why don't people just open... my works instead of accusing me?
The so-called world knows everything about Slobodan Milosevic. The so-called world knows the truth. But I don't know the truth. But I watch. I feel. I remember. I question.
Don Juan's story can have no end, and that, on my word, is the definitive and true story of 'Don Juan.'
My place is in Serbia if the NATO criminals bomb.
I am a writer and not a judge.
Most older people don't talk about the past so they won't have to admit that their life ran on the wrong rail.
I like literature, not opinions. I hate opinions.
You can't be silent and create silence in being silent. So you have to create silence or, rather, the effect of silence, through words.
I wrote about my journey through the country of Serbia exactly as I have always written my books, my literature.
Morality is the least of my concerns. To me, morality in a society that - however moral its pose - is hierarchically organized is simply a lie, an alibi for the inequalities that exist in society.
I don't read my own books, but sometimes if there is a new edition I open it and then I feel this life of a writer was not so hopeless, not so bad.
An artist is only an exemplary person if you can see in his works how life goes.
I'm Austrian, but my mother was Slovenian.
There are many kinds of truth. But truth communicated by beauty is the only pure one. The only one that touches me in the heart.
On my travels I, at least, did not see Serbia as a land of paranoiacs - much more as the huge room of an orphaned, yes, an orphaned, abandoned child.
Not a word that I have written about Yugoslavia is denounceable, not a single one. It is literature.
I wrote about the Serbs, because no one was writing about them, even if I also think about the Croat and Muslim victims.
I don't like intrigue. I'm not a man of intrigue.
I'm a conservative classical writer.
The biggest achievement is to create silence. I think every real writer who has a passion to do justice to the world thinks this way.
I am a writer. I am rooted in Tolstoy, I am rooted in Homer, I am rooted in Cervantes.
Everything is created to be annihilated.
Sometimes readers are telling me about what they read of my books and I don't remember at all.
I can't define myself. And I'm really happy about this, that I'm not able to make a definition of, even of my work.
Of course it would disgust me to tell anyone how to live.
If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.Collection: Writing
No one can be trusted who isn't thrilled with himself at least now and then.Collection: Now And Then
When the child was a child, it didn’t know that it was a child, everything was soulful, and all souls were one.Collection: Children
I couldn't say who I am, I haven't the remotest notion of myself; I am someone without antecedents, without a history, without a country, and on that I insist!Collection: Country