Quotes from 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!

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.

I'm a conservative classical writer.

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.

Everything is created to be annihilated.

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.

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

We behave as if being alone were a problem.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

I am a writer and not a judge.

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

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.

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

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

My place is in Serbia if the NATO criminals bomb.

Pero si el cansancio es ya por si mismo la mejor acción...! No es necesario que con él se pueda dar comienzo a nada, porque de por sí él es ya un comenzar y un dar -dar comienzo, se dice en un lenguaje culto-. Su dar-comienzo es una enseñanza. El cansancio enseña, es utilizable.