Best 26 quotes of Herman Koch on MyQuotes

I am not a great planner, so I have just a vague idea. And then I start to find out what kind of book I actually want to write.

In one way or another, every parent is curious what their children... what are they doing when we don't see?... What double lives are they leading? Is there something else?

Sometimes things come out of your mouth that you regret later on. Or no, not regret. You say something so razor-sharp that the person you say it to carries it around with them for the rest of their life.

When I'm writing I get easily bored.

When the conversation turns too quickly to films,I see it as a sign of weakness.

A bourgeois funeral is an artist’s worst nightmare.

Alleen mensen die zichzelf veel te belangrijk vinden denken dat ze overal gemist zullen worden.

A mediocre writer serves a life sentence. He has to go on. It's too late to change professions. He has to go on till the bitter end. Until death comes to get him. Only death can save him from his mediocrity. His writing is "not without merit," that's what we say about the mediocre writer. For him, that's the pinnacle of achievement, to produce books that are not without merit. You really do have to be mediocre to go on living once you've realized that.

And then it happened. It was a detail, no more than that. A detail to which you pay no attention at first. That takes on meaning only later. In retrospect.

A reader reads a book. If it’s a good book, he forgets himself. That’s all a book has to do. When the reader can’t forget himself and keeps having to think about the writer the whole time, the book is a failure. That has nothing to do with fun. If it’s fun you’re after, buy a ticket for a roller coaster.

Ein funkelnagelneues Buch, das noch nach Druckerschwärze riecht. Ein Buch, mit dem man manchen kann, was man will, und das man, wenn man es ausgelesen hat, in den eigenen Bücherschrank stellt. Statt eines widerlichen, nach allem anderen als Druckerschwärze riechenden Exemplars mit einem hässlichen Bibliothekseinband. Ein Buch wie eine öffentliche Toilette, bei der man nicht weiß, wer vor einem auf der Klobrille gesessen hat.

Free-ranging single men are like a house that has been empty too long. There must be something fishy about the house, the woman thinks. Up for sale for six months and it's still vacant.

I amazed myself, above all, with how well I was able to manage. Michel got to school on time, his teeth brushed and his clothes clean. More or less clean: I was less critical of a few spots on his trousers than Claire would have been, but then I was his father. I’ve never tried to be ‘both father and mother’ to him, the way some half-assed, home-made-sweater-wearing head of a single-parent household put it once in some bullshit programme I saw on afternoon TV.

I sometimes heard the parents of Michel's playmates sigh about how, after a busy day, they really needed "a moment to themselves." The children were in bed at last, and then came the magic moment, and not a minute earlier. I've always thought that was strange, because for me that moment began much earlier. When Michel came home from school, for example, and everything was as it should be.

I was remarkably calm. Calm and fatigued. There would be no violence. It was like a storm coming up. The café chairs are carried inside, the awnings are rolled up, but nothing happens. The storm passes over. And, at the same time, that’s too bad. After all, we would all rather see the roofs ripped from the houses, the trees uprooted and tossed through the air.

Nelle sere come questa io e Claire ci gustiamo i pochi momenti che possiamo ancora passare da soli. E improvvisamente tutto sembra possibile, sembra addirittura che l'appuntamento sia un equivoco, e che siamo usciti soltanto io e lei. Se dovessi dare una definizione di felicità, sarebbe questa: la felicità basta a se stessa, non ha bisogno di testimoni. «Tutte le famiglie felici si somigliano, ciascuna famiglia infelice è infelice a suo modo»: così recita l'incipit di Anna Karenina di Tolstoj. Si potrebbe aggiungere che le famiglie infelici, e soprattutto le coppie infelici, non riescono mai a stare da sole. Più testimoni ci sono, meglio è. L'infelicità è costantemente alla ricerca di compagnia. L'infelicità non tollera il silenzio, specialmente quei silenzi imbarazzati che calano quando si è soli. E così, in quel bar, quando sono arrivate le nostre birre io e Claire abbiamo riso, sapendo che poco dopo avremmo trascorso un'intera serata in compagnia dei coniugi Lohman: quello era il momento più bello della serata, e da lì in poi le cose non avrebbero potuto che peggiorare.

Non bisogna sempre sapere tutto l’uno dell’altro. I segreti non ostacolano la felicità

No, on the outside view there was nothing for anyone to notice about me. I remained one pillar of a trinity, another pillar was lying only temporarily (temporarily! temporarily! temporarily!) in the hospital, I was the pilot of a three-engine aircraft, one of whose engines had stalled: there is no reason to panic, this is not a crash landing, the pilot has thousands of flight hours behind him, he will land the plane safely on the ground.

Something in me whispered that I needed to stop thinking, that I should above all not go too far with thinking. But that never worked; I always thought things through to the end, to their most extreme consequence.

Suicide is a realistic option, I hear myself saying a minute later. Some people take comfort in the realization that they have control over the way their life ends. What they dread most of all is the implementation. The way in which. A train is so violent. Cutting your wrists in the bathtub is so bloody. Hanging is painful—it takes a long time before death comes. Sleeping pills may be vomited up. But there are substances that bring about a painless, easy death.

The dilemma I was faced with was one every parent faces sooner or later: you want to defend your child, of course; you stand up for your child, but you mustn't do it all too vehemently, and above all not too eloquently - you mustn't drive anyone into a corner. The educators, the teachers, will let you have your say, but afterwards they'll take revenge on your child. You may come up with better arguments - it's not too hard to come up with better arguments than the educators, the teachers - but in the end, your child to going to pay for it. Their frustration at being shown up is something they'll take out on the student.

The first thing that struck you about Claire’s plate was its vast emptiness. Of course I’m well aware that, in the better restaurants, quality takes precedence over quantity, but there are voids and then there are voids. The void here, that part of the plate on which no food at all was present, had clearly been raised to a matter of principle. It was as though the empty plate was challenging you to say something about it, to go to the open kitchen and demand an explanation. ‘You wouldn’t even dare!’ the plate said, and laughed in your face.

… when Michel came home from school, for example, and everything was as it should be. My own voice, above all, asking him what he wanted in his sandwich, also sounded as it should have. The larder was full, I had done all of the shopping that morning. I took care of myself as well, I looked in the mirror before leaving the house: I made sure my clothes were clean, that I had shaved, that my hair didn’t look like the hair of someone who never looks in a mirror - the people in the supermarket would have noticed nothing unusual, I was no divorced father reeking of alcohol, no father who couldn’t handle things. I clearly remembered the goal I had set for myself: I wanted to keep up the appearance of normality. As far as possible, everything had to remain the same for Michel as long as his mother wasn’t around. A hot meal every day, for a start. But also in other aspects of our temporary single-parent family, there shouldn’t be too many visible changes. Normally, it wasn’t my habit to shave every day; I didn’t mind walking around with stubble. Claire had never made a big deal out of that either, but during those weeks I shaved every morning. I felt that my son had a right to sit at the table with a clean-smelling, freshly shaven father. A freshly shaven and clean-smelling father would not prompt him to think the wrong things, would in any case not cause him to doubt the temporary character of our single-parent family.

When people get a chance to come close to death without having it touch them personally, they never miss the opportunity.

-You give her a three, he said... -That three was entirely fitting, I said. It was complete garbage. Not the kind of thing I expect the students to hand in... In addition to the Second World War, I also deal with a large part of the history that came afterwards,’ I interrupted again. Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, the Middle East and Israel, the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War, the Palestinians. I deal with all of that during my classes. So then you can’t expect to turn in a paper about the state of Israel in which people mostly pick oranges and dance in sandals around a campfire. Cheerful, happy people everywhere, and all that horseshit about the desert where flowers blossom again. I mean, people are shot and killed there every day, buses are blown up. What’s this all about? -She came in here crying, Paul. -I’d cry too if I turned in garbage like that.

You sometimes hear about people who have lost their sense of smell and taste: for those people, a plate of the most delicious food means nothing at all. That was how I looked at life sometimes, as a warm meal that was growing cold. I knew I had to eat, otherwise I would die, but I had lost my appetite.