Herta Müller on writing

Eat everything you play with. That could be a definition for writing. Who knows: I have to eat everything I write, and what I don’t write devours me. Even though I eat it, it doesn’t disappear. And even though it consumes me, I don’t disappear. The same thing always happens during writing, when words want to be something else in order to be accurate, when objects become independent and verbal images steal what doesn’t belong to them. Perhaps it’s precisely during writing, when words become something else in order to be accurate, that what’s operating is always the same snow and always the same uncle.