Top 33 Quotes & Sayings by Peter Handke

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Austrian novelist Peter Handke.

Last updated on September 17, 2024.

Peter Handke is an Austrian novelist, playwright, translator, poet, film director, and screenwriter. He was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature "for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience." Handke is considered to be one of the most influential and original German-language writers in the second half of the 20th century.

Austrian - Novelist | Born: December 6, 1942

Source: Wikipedia

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.

Peter Handke

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.

Peter Handke

I'm a conservative classical writer.

Peter Handke

I'm not a winner. My nature is not the nature of a winner.

Peter Handke

I am a writer. I am rooted in Tolstoy, I am rooted in Homer, I am rooted in Cervantes.

Peter Handke

I don't like intrigue. I'm not a man of intrigue.

Peter Handke

Of course it would disgust me to tell anyone how to live.

Peter Handke

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.

Peter Handke

I like literature, not opinions. I hate opinions.

Peter Handke

My place is in Serbia if the NATO criminals bomb.

Peter Handke

I'm Austrian, but my mother was Slovenian.

Peter Handke

An artist is only an exemplary person if you can see in his works how life goes.

Peter Handke

Don Juan's story can have no end, and that, on my word, is the definitive and true story of 'Don Juan.'

Peter Handke

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.

Peter Handke

Everything is created to be annihilated.

Peter Handke

I wrote about my journey through the country of Serbia exactly as I have always written my books, my literature.

Peter Handke

The most real dialogue for me is when I am alone, writing.

Peter Handke

Sometimes readers are telling me about what they read of my books and I don't remember at all.

Peter Handke

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.

Peter Handke

Samuel Beckett. He is a kind of hero for me.

Peter Handke

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.

Peter Handke

Most older people don't talk about the past so they won't have to admit that their life ran on the wrong rail.

Peter Handke

Not a word that I have written about Yugoslavia is denounceable, not a single one. It is literature.

Peter Handke

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.

Peter Handke

I am a writer and not a judge.

Peter Handke

We behave as if being alone were a problem.

Peter Handke

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.

Peter Handke

I wrote about the Serbs, because no one was writing about them, even if I also think about the Croat and Muslim victims.

Peter Handke

Why don't people just open... my works instead of accusing me?

Peter Handke

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Peter Handke

When the child was a child, it didn’t know that it was a child, everything was soulful, and all souls were one.

Peter Handke

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!

Peter Handke

No one can be trusted who isn't thrilled with himself at least now and then.

Peter Handke

Top 33 Quotes & Sayings by Peter Handke

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