Literary Birthday – 5 September – Herman Koch

Happy Birthday, Herman Koch, born on 5 September 1953.

Herman Koch Quotes

1. 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? (CAI NPR)
2. It goes from people saying, ‘oh, this seemed a nice man in the beginning, but in the end he is not, to put it mildly,’ and there’s another part of the readers who say, ‘finally, a character in a book who actually does what we are all thinking.’ (CAI NPR)
3. 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. (The Dinner)
4. 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. (NPR)
5. One thing I can tell you about, you know, like, planning this novel is that until a few months before ending it or at least trying to end it, I still didn’t have a clue as to where this teacher’s whereabouts – where he ended up. So this is the way I keep the suspense in the writing myself as well. (NPR)
6. When I’m writing I get easily bored. So changing perspectives, for me, was more like writing five short novels and packing them all into one. And I thought it just became a richer book.  (NPR)
7. When the conversation turns too quickly to films, I see it as a sign of weakness. (The Dinner)
8. 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. (Dear Mr. M)
9. I think this is the whole point about unsympathetic characters. There’s something about madness or badness that we like. (The Guardian)
10. 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. (Dear Mr. M)

Herman Koch is a Dutch novelist, short story writer, actor, and television producer. He is best known for novels such as The Dinner, Dear Mr. M, and Summer House with Swimming Pool. His fiction combines literary fiction, psychological thrillers, and satire. Koch was also the co-creator of the long-running Dutch absurdist comedy series Jiskefet (1990–2005). He has acted in radio, television, and film, as well as writing short stories and novels. The Dinner became an international bestseller, selling more than 2.5 million copies worldwide and spending a year on the New York Times bestseller list. It was adapted into a 2017 film starring Richard Gere. Koch’s characters are often unpleasant, distrustful, and violent. They may defend extreme views or make questionable moral choices. His novels explore themes such as happiness, mediocrity, cynicism, violence, beauty, and disgust. His direct, straightforward style makes his dark and unsettling stories easy to follow. In 2024, Koch published the memoir Are You Going to Write About It?, which followed his experience of receiving a cancer diagnosis.

Source for photograph: Vera de Kok, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Feest_der_Letteren-_2015-1-5.jpg

by Amanda Patterson
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