Illuminations for Every Man Dies Alone, Fallada

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I don’t know if I’m expressing myself clearly and comprehensibly. What I’m trying to say is this: That once I had started I couldn’t stop, that when I decided to write another novel (the book that later became a worldwide success under the title Little Man, What Now?) I was acting under a compulsion. I certainly didn’t write it for my readers. I never think about my readers when I’m writing a book. I only think about the book, about the characters in it, the fates in it. When I think about something other than those things, then I think very selfishly about me, I’m supplying myself with the greatest happiness which life has to give, making it flow into my breast and my heart: I’m writing, I’m writing every hour of the day and of the night, whether I’m sitting at my desk or walking around, whether I’m answering letters or talking with you here, everything becomes a book for me, one day it will have become a book, a little piece of this here, and that facial expression there, and those tables and chairs and windows. Everything in my life ends in a book. That’s how it has to be, it can’t be otherwise, because I’m the man that I became. (...)