Literary Birthday – 6 July – Bernhard Schlink

Happy Birthday, Bernhard Schlink, born 6 July 1944.

Five Quotes

As an author, you can’t expect a movie to be an illustration of the book. If that’s what you hope for, you shouldn’t sell the rights. As an author, you hope for a director and a cast that will make something wonderful out of your book. I think that’s what they all did with the movie.
If you keep a guilty person in solidarity, love, or admiration, you become entangled in this person’s guilt.
I need a couple of hours to get into writing. An afternoon or a full morning is really nice. But I try to carve out bigger chunks of time, a full day, a weekend, or even a whole week or weeks. I put aside whatever might come along and devote the time to writing.
As a citizen and someone who was a judge on the constitutional law court for 18 years, I feel whenever I can raise my voice with the hope of being heard I need to do it, but I wouldn’t assign a special wisdom and responsibility to writers.
I love writing, and I am never as happy as when I have a week, a month – three months – with nothing to do but write.

Bernhard Schlink is a German judge, philosopher, and writer. He is best known for writing the novel, The Reader, which was adapted into a film of the same name.

Source for image: Ps45md, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bernhard_Schlink,_2018_(cropped).jpg

by Amanda Patterson