Herman Koch Quotes & Sayings

That was how I looked at life sometimes, as a warm meal that was growing cold. I knew I had to eat, or else I would die, but I had lost my appetite. — Herman Koch

It also has to do with my profession. In my profession, true relaxation is a necessity. — Herman Koch

Claire is smarter than I am. I'm not saying that out of some half-baked feminist sentiment or in order to endear women to me. You'll never hear me claim that 'women in general' are smarter than men. Or more sensitive, more intuitive, or that they are more 'in touch with life', or any of the other horseshit that, when all is said and done, so-called 'sensitive' men try to peddle more often than women themselves. — Herman Koch

Your wife's willingness to allow a daughter to grow inside her who had, by all laws of probability, a fifty-percent chance of inheriting your face, is something you should view as a compliment. Perhaps the greatest compliment a woman can give a man. — Herman Koch

Some people might say it's not smart to be so insecure about what you wear. But that's not how I see it. The stupid woman is the one who thinks she doesn't need any help. What does a man know about things like that? a stupid woman thinks, and proceeds to make the wrong choice. — Herman Koch

No longer in print ... There are sentences, and phrases that, in all their simplicity, say much more than they seem to at first: two months to live, never heard of it, dead on arrival ... For a writer, no longer in print must fall somewhere in that category. — Herman Koch

-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. — Herman Koch

I'm not going to say what was wrong with Claire, not here. I consider that a private matter. It's nobody's business what kind of illnesses you've had - in any case it's up to her if she wants to talk about it, and not up to me. — Herman Koch

The chair was Claire's, it belonged to my wife. Without a doubt, he could now feel her body heat, left behind on the seat, right through the cloth of his trousers. The thought of it made me furious. — Herman Koch

The evenings were the worst. I stood at the window of my hotel room and looked at the traffic and the thousands of little lights and the people who all seemed to be on their way to something. — Herman Koch

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. — Herman Koch

His eyes had something dull about them, expressionless, the bored look of a mediocre intelligence that wrongly supposes it has seen it all before. — Herman Koch

He was drunk, he did his best to keep talking in the hope that she wouldn't notice, but he felt his words slipping away, struggling to keep their balance - while yet other words kept sticking together. "Jan, I'm hanging up now. I don't want to talk to you. — Herman Koch

I let go of the pump as well now. I registered a sense of fatigue. And regret. It was the same fatigue and regret you feel when you miss a tennis ball. You were planning to smash it, but you swing hard and miss; the arm holding the racket meets no resistance and lashes wildly through the air. — Herman Koch

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. — Herman Koch

All these heads, I thought. All these heads into which everything disappears. — Herman Koch

We looked at each other. At that moment, I was also a hundred percent sure that Van Dieren and I were thinking the same thing. But he didn — Herman Koch

At Kayenta we were told that the entire Navajo Indian reservation was dry; you couldn't get a drop of alcohol anywhere. Not with dinner,but also not at the supermarket. "It's like Iran," Caroline said, taking a sip of her Coke. "But right in the middle of America. — Herman Koch

His honest eyes that had always been so bad at lying. — Herman Koch

During a working day, there's nothing I look forward to more than an evening of nothing at all. A meal. A beer or a glass of wine. The evening news on TV. A B movie or a soccer match. A working day like that gets off on the right foot. It's a day with promise. — Herman Koch

I looked at him. I wondered what it would be like to have a father whose face you couldn't see. Whether a day would finally come when, as the daughter of a father like that, you simply lost patience - or whether you got used to it, like bad wallpaper. — Herman Koch

I liked being inside the head of someone who reveals himself unknowingly while he still thinks most people find him sympathetic. DG: — Herman Koch

Paul reveals more about himself than he probably realizes. He isn't too aware of who he really is. — Herman Koch

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? — Herman Koch

What barely seemed to register with him was that those regular people were earning large sums of money off him, off the Dutchman with his summer home and his money, and it was in part for that reason that they continued to exercise a modicum of courtesy. — Herman Koch

This was happening to me more often lately: suddenly, pieces of the puzzle were gone - bites out of time, empty moments during which my thoughts must have been elsewhere. — Herman Koch

That's the oppressive thing about happiness, the way everything is out on the table like an open book: — Herman Koch

Yet there was something else, something different about her this time, like a room where someone has thrown out all the flowers while you were gone: a change in the interior you don't even notice at first, not until you see the stems sticking out of the garbage. — Herman Koch

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. — Herman Koch

Anger made her prettier. Especially her eyes - it was a look that put men to shame. — Herman Koch

There are times when you run back through your life, to see whether you can locate the point at which it could still have taken a different turn. — Herman Koch

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. — Herman Koch

Movie or no, you should never put pictures of the book's characters on the cover. That only cramps the reader's fantasy. You force him to keep seeing the faces of the actors in the movie. For someone who has seen the movie first and then, out of curiosity, goes on to read the whole book, that might not be so bad. But anyone who reads the book first is faced with a dilemma. During the reading he sees the faces of all the characters in his mind's eye. Faces he wants to assemble with his own fantasy. No matter how those faces may be described. Despite your superfluous descriptions of noses, eyes, ears, and hair color, each reader constructs his own faces in his own imagination. Three hundred thousand readers; that's three hundred thousand different faces for each character. Three hundred thousand faces that are destroyed at one fell swoop by that one face in the movie. As a reader, it's pretty tough to remember that imaginary face after seeing the actor on the screen. Two — Herman Koch

Without Claire I wouldn't have been nowhere, but I would have been somewhere else. — Herman Koch

You get a stain on your pants. Your favorite pair of pants. You wash them ten times in a row at 160 degrees. You scrub and scour and rub. You bring in the heavy artillery. Bleaches. Abrasive cleaners. But the spot doesn't go away. If you scrub and scour too long, it will only be replaced by something else. By a stretch of fabric that is thinner and paler. The paler cloth is the memory. The memory of the spot. Now there are two things you can do. You can throw the pants away, or you can walk around for the rest of your life with the memory of the stain. But the paler cloth reminds you of more than just the stain. It also reminds you of when the pants were still clean. — Herman Koch

I got the sneaky feeling that I was present at something at which I would rather not be present. It made me think of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Of Oprah Winfrey. — Herman Koch

His voice, which always carried right across the lawn. A voice like a foghorn. A voice that tankers and container vessels might use to find their bearings in distant estuaries and foreign ports. — Herman Koch

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. — Herman Koch

A fixed appointment for the immediate future is the gates of hell; — Herman Koch

Unhappiness loves company. Unhappiness can't stand silence - especially not the uneasy silence that settles in when it is all alone. — Herman Koch

When we were still living at home, all he ever drank was cola, huge amounts of it; he had no problem knocking back an entire king-size bottle at dinnertime. Then he would produce these gigantic belches, for which he was sometimes sent to his room, belches that lasted ten years or longer
like subterranean thunder rolling up and exploding from somewhere deep down in his stomach
and for which he enjoyed a certain schoolyard fame: among the boys, that is, for he knew even then that girls were only repulsed by burps and farts. — Herman Koch

An overburdened liver sounds different from a healthy one. An overburdened liver groans. It groans and begs. It begs for a day off. A day to deal with the worst of the garbage. — Herman Koch

If I had to give a definition of happiness, it would be this: happiness needs nothing but itself; it doesn't have to be validated. — Herman Koch

A look says more than words alone. That's a cliche, of course. But a cliche, also says more than words alone. — Herman Koch

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. — Herman Koch

Happiness needs nothing but itself; it doesn't have to be validated. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in it's own way. — Herman Koch

Back in the shadows, in the darkest part of the garden beside the hedge, the skinny choreographer was making out with the younger member of the writer couple. I saw a hand slip inside a shirt and looked the other way. — Herman Koch

Even when you act like nothing is happening, something happens - I don't know how to put it any more clearly. It's — Herman Koch

Is it life threatening? they asked. They said it slightly sotto voce, but you could hear the thirst for sensation right through it: when people get a chance to come close to death without having it touch them personally, they never miss the opportunity. — Herman Koch

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. — Herman Koch

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. That — Herman Koch

Biology is a force to be reckoned with. An ugly child you love with all your heart and soul, you. But it's different. You're pleased with your third-floor walk-up, also, until someone invites you I've to dinner at a house with a pool in the garden. — Herman Koch

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

Technically, just like with the rings of a tree or Carbon-14, it had to be possible to measure the passage of time by the melting of vanilla ice cream. — Herman Koch

Around here, we're as happy as God in France. — Herman Koch

Some people need a kick in the ass, others just need to think less for a couple of hours. — Herman Koch

Christ, what an asshole! Babette said. — Herman Koch

By using the word 'tolerance,' you're simply placing yourself on a higher plane than those you tolerate. Tolerance is only possible when one fosters a deep-rooted sense of superiority. — Herman Koch

This particular restaurant is one where you have to call three months in advance - or six, or eight, don't ask me. Personally, I'd never want to know three months in advance where I'm going to eat on any given evening, but apparently some people don't mind. A few centuries from now, when historians want to know what kind of crazies people were at the start of the twenty-first century, all they'll have to do is look at the computer files of the so-called "top" restaurants. — Herman Koch

Flippancy. A laughing matter. It's like with funerals. They are, first and foremost, expected to be fun. There is laughter and drinking and bad language. To keep the whole thing from being too bourgeois. A bourgeois funeral is an artist's worst nightmare. — Herman Koch

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. — Herman Koch

From that moment on a distinction was imposed between literature and the rest: the other books. From then on literature was either good or bad. Bad literature he read with a gnashing of teeth, growling and fidgeting in his easy chair, furious in fact at such pretentiously formulated impotence. But with the good literature too, something of the original pleasure was ruined once and for all. — Herman Koch

Life as a widow, she thinks, will always be like this. The friends will go on proposing toasts for months (for years!). To her. To their new center of attention. What she doesn't know yet is that, after a few courtesy calls, it will all be over. The silence that will follow is the same silence that always falls after a life in the shadows. — Herman Koch

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. — Herman Koch

It's like a pistol in a stage play: when someone waves a pistol during the first act, you can bet your bottom dollar that someone will be shot with it before the curtain falls. That's the law of drama. The law that says no pistol must appear if no one's going to fire it. — Herman Koch

I looked and felt my head gradually grow cold. It was the sort of coldness you feel when you take too big a bite from an ice-cream cone or sip too greedily from an ice-cold drink. The kind of coldness that hurt - from the inside out. — Herman Koch

It glistens, it gleams, I — Herman Koch

It was war. You're better off winning a war than losing it. History teaches us that. And biology. You're better off beating someone to death, than being beaten to death. From time immemorial, the man has guarded the entrance to the cave. Intruders are sent packing. People. Animals. A persistent intruder can't say later that he hasn't been warned. — Herman Koch

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. — Herman Koch

The stupid woman is the one who thinks she doesn't need any help. — Herman Koch

He was, in any case, more intelligent than the moronic heap of compost sitting across the desk from me — Herman Koch