Quotes from Heinrich Boll

I seldom have a firm plot or any idea at all about the ending. But there is a clear, almost mathematically conceptual idea that determines length--the length or brevity of a literary work being comparable to the size of the frame needed by a picture.

When I am asked how or why I wrote this or that, I always find myself quite embarrassed. I would gladly furnish not merely the questioner, but myself as well, with an exhaustive answer, but can never do so. I cannot recreate the context in its entirety, yet I wish that I could, so that at least the literature I myself make might be made slightly less of a mysterious process than bridge-building and bread-baking.

Most people, being denied reliable telepathic communication, reach for the phone, which they feel is more reliable.

When I got the Nobel Prize I said to myself that it had made me neither smarter nor more stupid.

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. There are terrible forms of professional humor, the humorists' humor. That can be awful. It depresses me because it is artificial. You can't always be humorous, but a professional humorist must. That is a sad phenomenon.

Writing is - at least for me - movement forward, the conquest of a body that I do not know at all, away from something to something that I do not yet know; I never know what will happen - and here 'happen' is not intended as plot resolution, in the sense of classical dramaturgy, but in the sense of a complicated and complex experiment that with given imaginary, spiritual, intellectual and sensual materials in interaction strives - on paper to boot! - towards incarnation.

Here on earth we find ourselves in a waiting room.

It is still possible, in an election, to use the word emigrant in such a way that it damages one's opponent

High spirits and a good time need trust, that's what they're built upon.

have you read any book from "heinrich boll"?he is my faverit writer . what do u think about his books?

An artist is like a woman who can do nothing but love, and who succumbs to every stray male jackass.