Herta Muller Quotes

I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.

So usually even if you like a sentence or a story or something, it won't come out that way - it'll come out years later, and in a different way, and you don't really control that.

You know how some people write every day at a certain point? I'm not like that. I carry something around for a long time. I weigh the words and the sentences. I weigh the paragraphs. The process is much more meditative for me.

I didn't think about whether I was writing poems. I was thinking. And the more I was thinking, the more there was I didn't understand.

One of the things is, in the writing process, if you do it enough, you have a sense of where you are. I didn't have that with the first book as I was writing it. Now, as I write books, I have a sense of where I am. Unfortunately, the sense of where I am is usually behind.

Revision is not going back and fussing around, but going forward into the process of creation

For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself.

If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my entire life, I am most surprised by those moments when I have felt as if the sentences, dreams, and pages that have made me so ecstatically happy have not come from my own imagination - that another power has found them and generously presented them to me.

Occasionally if I look back at something I've written I'll find one of those that I don't understand, but that's a bad thing - the unconscious has dealt me a bad hand.

I write a chapter, then edit it and edit it and edit it and edit it. I don't think we mine creativity from within. It's bestowed from on high, from God.

One of the odd things about being a writer is that you never reach a point of certainty, a point of mastery where you can say, 'Right. Now I understand how this is done.'

Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don't know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don't know. I really don't know.

When it comes to lyrics, I just write down a lot of things, and only a very tiny fraction of it, I think, is any good.

I am never really surprised at the way my books take shape. They are just not as perfect as I'd like them to be.

Every really good book was written a little at a time, over time, in tremendous confusion and doubt.

For me, writing a novel is more like digging a well than climbing a mountain - some heroic thing where I set out to conquer. I just sit quietly for a few years, and then it starts to become something.

I very seldom read back into what I've written.

The only time you actually are a spectator of your own work is the day you read the script.

In time I began to understand that it's when you start writing that you really find out what you don't know and need to know.

If you're a writer, you know there are ways in which we don't know what we're doing at all. We're working out mysteries in a sort of poetic realm, and hoping that if a story is honest, if you're dragging the deep truth out of yourself, then something good and profound might come out of it.

A writer's job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means.

I feel like you just need to keep writing until the writing itself just begins to take shape.

When I'm writing a first draft of a script, I can disappear into that for two, three months exclusively.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that writing is mysterious; you don't ever truly know where it is coming from, so don't edit yourself line by line. Don't get in your own way. Whatever is truly there at the core, that is your voice.

Many times I have written something, and after it was published, I understood what I was saying.