Interview with the 2019 Nobel Prize laureate in literature Peter Handke on 9 December 2019 during the Nobel Week in Stockholm, Sweden.

How does your writing process begin? 

Peter Handke: I start with a feeling and images and rhythm. This is inside me. Sometimes I have a story to tell. It is always this transformation during the work. This keeps me alive. I don’t want to know exactly what I have to do. It happens, and it should be a wonderful surprise to me, to the writer too. I write, I have to be surprised, not by myself, by somebody who is not only me.  

What do you need in order to be creative?  

Peter Handke: Writing is writing. Like a rose is a rose, and writing is writing. It’s controlled at the same time, but sometimes I lose control too. It goes together. I have no typewriter anymore. I was traveling a lot 30 years ago, and every country had another system of the type of writing. I made a lot of mistakes. The so-called inspiration went away, was destroyed by, all the other systems of letters. 30 years ago, I tried to write by hand with pencil, nothing else. The small town where I was to start a work was very noisy. It was Easter week in Spain. It’s a very good noise, but not for writing. So I could walk outside the small town to the savanna and sit down under a eucalyptus tree. One of my quietest most intense experience of writing started there 30 years ago, in the northern part of Andalucia. 

How do you deal with failure or writer’s block? 

Peter Handke: I had a long moment in my life before I started to write the book, which is the nearest of my, it’s Slow Homecoming. I don’t know what the title is in Swedish, it’s translated. Langsame Heimkehr. There was one very short moment. I told myself, I failed everything. Now it’s the end. This was one very short moment, I felt this. I was 36 years old. I was trying to write in New York City, and I was educating my first child alone. I left my child to write this long story I had in my heart since two or three years. Then I started to write. 

Not even the first sentence worked. I had the first sentence, which was very short. But then this first sentence became very long during the next days. I told myself, now it’s finished. But next, the next day, I continued. This was a kind of failure, but I’d make a fiction as if I didn’t fail. It worked. I’m still here. 

How would you describe yourself as a writer? 

Peter Handke: My essence is epic essence. I come from Homer, I come from Cervantes. This is my origins. I come from Tolstoy. This is my inner innermost world. 

I’m not somebody who can do everything in any transformation. No, my soul is epic. 

Did you agree with the initial assessment of your work as avant-garde? 

Peter Handke: No, even my first play was a kind of a game. It was a game by which I freed myself for my two heavy inner worlds when I was young, 21, 22. It was the period of the Beatles. First, I was ashamed that I liked it so lot. But then I decided, this is my music, the Beatles. I Saw Her Standing There, Yesterday, Norwegian Wood – not Swedish Wood! Then I started to write for a theater tour. 

It’s in the play in an ironic way. The actors tell the public this is a classical play, it’s not avant-garde. Listen to it, this is classic. This was 55 years ago. I’m not avant-garde. They called me that. If you want to call me avant-garde, as a young man, do it. But I don’t feel so, I didn’t feel so. 

Has music influenced your literary work?  

Peter Handke: I don’t believe in the connection between literature and music. When somebody tells you my literature is musical, no! Literature has its own rhythm. Somebody who makes kind of jazz with literature, it’s against myself. Literature is literature. Literature has its own, not melody, its own sound. 

It’s a kind of sound. But it’s a silent sound. It’s a very silent and unique sound. Nothing to do with music. But music can can wake you to take your own way in literature. 

What is it about language that you find so fascinating? 

Peter Handke: Language is very seldom. Nowadays, language is everywhere, and language has become very dirty for me. But this is the paradox: in this dirty language of today, everywhere is dirty language killing of language, killing soul. But in this killing of language, the purest soul of human being is language. But you find it only in literature. This is my life. 

What role does literature have in society? 

Peter Handke: I think the critics – but there are nearly no critics anymore – they should define it. I’m a critical man. But I don’t want to be a critic in writing. When I write, critics is behind me. No critic, no opinion, only images, rhythm, feeling. Like Kafka said, I could search in myself during one year to find a real feeling. He was a little bit exaggerating for he was a very shy man. One real feeling, it’s not much. But nevertheless, this exists. I think I wrote a long story about the man despair. I think it’s translated in Swedish. It is A Moment of True Feeling. This is my “point de départ,” in French. I am traveling with the moment of true feeling. It’s a kind of travelling. 

Which writers have most influenced your writing style? 

Peter Handke: Not so few. There were many. I think it started when I was young, 14, I was blown away by the books by William Faulkner, the American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. And then Dostoyevsky and Kafka.I went to a kind of seminary. I should become a Catholic priest, but I faked it, I lied. For people like me, we had no money. There was no possibility to go to a normal school. This was a kind, kind of seminary. And then we studied ancient Greek and Latin. This was a good thing that continues even now for me. 

Then I read Homer’s Iliade and the Odyssey. And Virgil, the Roman, great poet. They are inside me. Even Raymond Chandler, the detective writer in the United States. Dashiell Hammett, Georges Simenon, French. I could make a litany of 35, 50 minutes before you. 

How do you see the interplay between filmmaking, art and writing? 

Peter Handke: It exists. I know, I feel it. When I discovered the paintings of Paul Cézanne, of the mountain near Aix-en-Provence in the southern part of France, la Montagne Sainte-Victoire. All these paintings, he did over his life of this mountain. I told myself, this is my subject too. When I saw the early Italian painters like Giotto – his paintings, for instance, in Padua, near Venice, in the Cappella degli Scrovegni. These are my prophets. But not in a strict religion sense. Giotto, Cézanne, Nicolas Poussin, Rembrandt. 

Musically, Bach, Schubert, our Austrian composer, Joseph Haydn. Not so much Beethoven. For me, he’s too dramatic. He’s a genius. But I’m afraid of genius. Giotto, like Michelangelo, you can say he is a genius. Giotto is beyond genius. He’s a human medium of form, of colours, of situations, of confrontation. There, you can compare literature with paintings. 

Tell us about your collaboration with Wim Wenders on Wings of Desire.  

Peter Handke: Wim was a friend when I was very young. I became so-called famous, and he was a scholar. He’s three years younger than me, I think. He came to me and we became friends. At my age now, it’s very seldom to become friends with somebody. 

We stayed together, always in the distance. Wings of Desire, he asked me to write dialogues, monologues, stories. But we didn’t work together. I was living at the time in Austria, Salzburg, and during perhaps two or three weeks, I was writing dialogues, songs, texts, monologues, descriptions. Every day I sent him by during the shooting of the film. He used it. He decided how to find the rhythm of my writings. He put it in his vision of angels.  

What advice would you give to an aspiring writer? 

Peter Handke: A real writer doesn’t need any advice. No school at all. 

Watch the interview