Quotes from Heinrich Boll

My most interesting correspondence is with my translators. I marvel at their sensitivity over certain passages that just anyone, even if he knows German well, would not appreciate.

On a visit to Cologne in March 1945, after a heavy bombing, I met hundreds and hundreds of deserters who were squatting in the rubble, many in the deep cellars left from Roman times. They had been hiding there after the retreat from France.

We must learn, and especially we Germans, that resistance is not only possible and allowed in dictatorships. There is resistance that man must perform every day.

Medals don't suit me. I'm not that kind of guy.

The war is not planned. I don't believe that any responsible person plans it. But it's thought as possible.

I was born December 21, 1917, in Cologne, on the Rhine, the son of the sculptor and cabinet-maker, Viktor Boell, and his wife, Maria, nee Hermanns.

I will never forget the moment when I was liberated by the American Army. I will never forget those very young boys coming up the hill, who had to take me a prisoner to liberate me.

The Nazi period could have happened only in Germany because the German education of obedience to any law and order was the main problem.

As early as December 1945, I accompanied my wife and a few relatives in their return from evacuation in the countryside to Cologne, where over the years we settled down in a destroyed house.

Between 1950 and 1951, I worked as a temporary employee in the Cologne Bureau of Statistics. From summer 1951 on, I have lived as a freelance writer with a fixed postal address in Cologne but with a continually shifting place of work.

Because the completion of labour service was a precondition for permission to study at the university, I was able to begin my studies of Germanistics and Classical Philology during the summer term of 1939.

Politicians, ideologists, theologians and philosophers try time and again to provide solutions with nothing remaining: prefab solved problems.

A child... never takes time off as a child; time off does not begin until the principles of order have been accepted.

Humor is really one of the hardest things to define, very hard. And it's very ambiguous. You have it, or you don't. You can't attain it.

Many writers are radical. I am not, because of my age and because of my terrible fear of demagogy.

It's true and it's easily said that language is material, and something does materialise as one writes.

Something must happen!

No one will ever know how many novels, poems, analyses, confessions, sufferings and joys have been piled up on this continent called Love, without it ever having turned out to be totally investigated.

If the dead could speak there would be no more war.

For me, at least, much of the German I see and hear sounds stranger than Swedish, a language of which I unfortunately understand very little.

Literature has its own life, even in a dictatorship like the Soviet Union.

I cattolici mi rendono nervoso perché sono sleali. E i protestanti? domandò ridendo, quelli mi fanno star male con quel loro pasticciare intorno alla coscienza. E gli atei? rideva ancora. Quelli mi annoiano perché parlano sempre di Dio. E lei che cos'è, in conclusione? Io sono un clown.

Probably the best way to kill aesthetes is with valuable objets d'art so that in death they can still get mad over an act of vandalism.

If Continental tea is like a faded yellow telegraph form, in these islands to the west of Ostend it has the dark, glimmering tones of Russian icons, before the milk gives it a color similar to the complexion of an overfed baby; on the Continent weak tea is served in fragile porcelain, here it is casually poured into thick earthenware cups from battered metal teapots, a heavenly brew to restore the traveler, dirt cheap too.