Literary Birthday – 6 July – Bernhard Schlink

Happy Birthday, Bernhard Schlink, born on 6 July 1944.

Bernhard Schlink Quotes

1. 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.
2. If you keep a guilty person in solidarity, love, or admiration, you become entangled in this person’s guilt.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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 philosopher and writer. He is best known for writing the novel, The Reader, which was adapted into a film of the same name. The novel was influenced by experiences growing up in post-WWII Germany, exploring guilt, shame, and how the ‘second generation’ had to reconcile with the atrocities committed by their parents. He is a member of PEN Centre Germany. A former judge, he teaches public law and legal philosophy at Humboldt University of Berlin and at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City. His latest novel is The Granddaughter.

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

by Amanda Patterson
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