61 Quotes by 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.

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.

A fixed appointment for the immediate future is the gates of hell; the actual evening is hell itself.

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.

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.

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.

For women, earrings are sort of what shaving is for men: the bigger the earrings, the more significant, the more festive, the evening.

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.

A fixed appointment for the immediate future is the gates of hell;.