- Jonathan Littell was born on October 10, 1967 in New York City, New York, USA. He is a writer and director, known for Wrong Elements (2016), Le couronnement (2019) and Les Bienveillantes (2014).
- Lives in Barcelona, Spain.
- Has French and US citizenship.
- Speaks French and English fluently.
- Littell said that the original inspiration for his novel "The Kindly Ones" ["Les Bienveillantes", first published in Sept. 2006] was Claude Lanzmann's acclaimed documentary Shoah (1985). He first saw it in 1989 or 1991.
- Flaubert is probably the author that gives me the greatest pleasure.[2008, translated}
- Suicide is not an option for me. I think like Samuel Beckett, who says he can't go on, and then goes on. All writers, who I love, thought so, Maurice Blanchot , Georges Bataille , William S. Burroughs... After all, what's the alternative? One can be a junkie, but that was for me never an option. I also take no pills. I only drink too much whiskey, but not to forget. You have to go through the shit and continue. You have to be like Socrates and design a stoic concept of life and stay as decent as possible while living. Michel Foucault has called this the "self-care". One should have his pleasure, as far as possible, and not harm anyone.[2008, translated}
- About [Austrian author] Peter Handke I will not speak. I worshiped him. I loved him. But since he wrote this nonsense about the war in Bosnia, I do not read his books anymore. When he allied himself with the Serbian murderers, he made a terrible mistake. That's unforgivable. (...) If a family sits in their home in Foca [today Bosnia-Herzegovina], and suddenly someone comes up with a machine gun, chains the daughter to the radiator and rapes her in front of the parents, that's not funny. Well, you can say, that's how the world is. But you don't go and be kind to these criminals and shake their hands. That's obscene, and that's what Handke has done. He should keep his mouth shut. He may be fantastic as an artist, but as a human being he is my enemy. You have to separate the areas. One may be immoral, as long as one moves in the art. But once you leave this area and start to speak politically, other rules apply. If you compare Handke with Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who was a fascist and wrote anti-Semitic pamphlets, you will understand what I mean. Céline was a great poet, and today I can say that I appreciate him, because he's dead. But if I would have lived in the thirties of the last century, I would have tried to kill him.[2008, translated}
- [on writing] Apart from a bad science fiction novel I wrote with 19, and a theoretical essay, I only wrote four short stories, the "Etudes", for which I needed no more than a few hours, and the novel "The Kindly Ones" , for which I needed exactly 112 days to write. But if you include taking notes, thinking, doing research, the whole preparation, then I write constantly. I'm like a bullfighter, who prepares for the fight. When I finally have to face the bull, I fight against the language and the grammar that resists me and I must defeat.{2008, translated]
- The world is a nightmare, awful, a constant horror, but there is no way out. [2008, translated]
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