I like literature, not opinions. I hate opinions.
— 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.
We behave as if being alone were a problem.
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.
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.
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.
I am a writer. I am rooted in Tolstoy, I am rooted in Homer, I am rooted in Cervantes.
The most real dialogue for me is when I am alone, writing.
I'm Austrian, but my mother was Slovenian.
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'm not a winner. My nature is not the nature of a winner.
I wrote about the Serbs, because no one was writing about them, even if I also think about the Croat and Muslim victims.
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.
Samuel Beckett. He is a kind of hero for me.
Don Juan's story can have no end, and that, on my word, is the definitive and true story of 'Don Juan.'
My place is in Serbia if the NATO criminals bomb.
Not a word that I have written about Yugoslavia is denounceable, not a single one. It is literature.
I don't like intrigue. I'm not a man of intrigue.
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.
Everything is created to be annihilated.
I am a writer and not a judge.
Why don't people just open... my works instead of accusing me?
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.
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.
Of course it would disgust me to tell anyone how to live.
I wrote about my journey through the country of Serbia exactly as I have always written my books, my literature.
An artist is only an exemplary person if you can see in his works how life goes.
I'm a conservative classical writer.
Sometimes readers are telling me about what they read of my books and I don't remember at all.
