novelists-from-germany

"Give me love and contentment that I may proclaim thy glory, Lord of earth; give me health with competence, a pious heart, and a steadfast mind; give me children, worthy of all care; scare from my cheerful hearth the foe away; then give me wings, and one small hill of sand in my loved Fatherland, give wings to the soul so unwilling to flee, that it may easily tear itself from this beautiful world."

"In my profession it isn’t a question of telling good literature from bad. Really good literature is seldom appreciated in its own day. The best authors die poor, the bad ones make money – it’s always been like that. What do I, an agent, get out of a literary genius who won’t be discovered for another hundred years? I’ll be dead myself then. Successful incompetents are what I need."

"In my position I simply can’t afford pangs of conscience. Fortunately, they fade the more power one acquires. It’s an entirely natural process."

"His unorthodox didactic method of imparting his monumental store of knowledge was a curious mixture of megalomania and modesty, because he claimed to have picked it up from others. The truth was, he had invented it all himself and never tired, day after day and lesson after lesson, of devising new absurdities that would fire my imagination."

"It symbolizes the three components of power: power, power and power."

"It’s not a story for people with thin skins and weak nerves, whom I would advise to replace this book on the pile at once and slink off to the children’s section. Shoo! Be gone, you cry-babies and quaffers of chamomile tea, you wimps and softies! This book tells of a place where reading is still a genuine adventure, and by adventure I mean the old-fashion definition of the word that appears in the Zamonian dictionary: ‘A daring enterprise undertaken in a spirit of curiosity or temerity, it is potentially life-threatening, harbours unforeseeable dangers and sometimes proves fatal.’ Yes, I speak of a place where reading can drive people insane. Where books may injure and poison them – indeed, even kill them. Only those who are thoroughly prepared to take such risks in order to read this book – only those willing to hazard their lives in so doing – should accompany me to the next paragraph. The remainder I congratulate on their wise but yellow-bellied decision to stay behind. Farewell, you cowards! I wish you a long and boring life, and, on that note, bid you goodbye!"

"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written, that’s all."

"Reading is an intelligent way of not having to think."

"One’s memory functions like a spider’s web. Unimportant things – the wind, for example – a web lets through, whereas captured flies become lodged in it and are stored there until the spider needs and devours them."

"I’m not much of an expert on entomology because most insects fill me with a revulsion in proportionate to the number of legs they possess."

"I chewed them as I looked round the room, feeling thoroughly restored. A drink of water and a handful of smoked maggots had sufficed to turn a despairing wreck into a cheerful optimist. It isn’t the brain that governs our state of mind, it’s in the stomach."

"In the end, because you become inured to anything you meet in vast numbers, I grew accustomed to the sight of these innumerable skeletons. I ceased to flinch whenever I rounded a bend in a tunnel and was confronted by a skeletal figure with its arm raised in salutation. There was even something comforting about this world of the dead, because the absence of life betokened the absence of danger. All that is evil stems from the living; the dead are a peaceable bunch."

"You probably suppose that what you heard last night was music. Allow me to correct you: it was acoustic alchemy, hypnosis by means of sound waves. Music is the least resistible of all the arts, so I simply had to make use of it. Try getting an audience to dance by reciting a poem! Try getting them to march! Impossible! Only music can do that."

"Writing is a desperate attempt to extract some dignity – and a modicum of money – from solitude."

"Curiosity is the most powerful incentive in the world. Why? Because it’s capable of overcoming the two most powerful disincentives in the world: common sense and fear."

"I now understood the secret of music and knew what makes it so infinitely superior to all the other arts: its incorporeality. Once it has left an instrument it becomes its own master, a free and independent creature of sound, weightless, incorporeal and perfectly in tune with the universe."

"“How can the answer to today’s questions be in such an old book?” “The answers to almost all of today’s questions can be found in old books,” Smyke retorted. “If you want to find out, look them up. If not, forget it.”"

"Yes, yes, but why was it invisible, like everything you had to take on trust? Because it didn’t exist at all?"

"But his illness never attained the merciful degree of severity that would have entitled him to a spell in a lunatic asylum and absolve him from further work. It wasn’t quite severe enough for a lunatic; only for a writer."

"“Regenschein is dead, my friend. You’re delirious.” “No one who writes a good book is really dead.”"

"This was nonsense, of course, but he lectured so brilliantly and plausibly that I could only marvel at his inexhaustible ingenuity."

"Many people may think it is insane of someone endowed with such a potential abundance of power to spend his life producing works of art which no one can see. Well, my own ideas of morality prescribe that only a lunatic would aspire to subordinate the fate of others to his own wishes. I leave it to a higher authority to decide which view is the right one."

"“No, literature isn’t eternal,” he cried. “It’s a thing of the moment. Even if you made books with pages of steel and diamond letters, they would some day crash into the sun and melt, together with our planet. Nothing is eternal, least of all in art. It doesn’t matter how long an author’s work continues to glimmer after his death. What matters is how brightly it burns while he’s still alive.”"

"The problem is this: in order to make money – lots of money – we don’t need flawless literary masterpieces. What we need is mediocre rubbish, trash suitable for mass consumption. More and more, bigger and bigger blockbusters of less and less significance. What counts is the paper we sell, not the words that are printed on it."

"The desire for power is the most reliable of emotions."

"Without darkness there would be no concept of light For light to be self aware it must have its opposite—darkness."

"Even aperson deprived of his own ideas and individuality, at the very moment he gains power, acquires substance and content The function of power is to transform the inner being of the holder of power. Power credit and fame create individuality and a face for a person deprived of these qualities by nature."

"Their heads, up on top, at the back of the head, where the hair makes a cowlick...is where they smell best of all...Once you've smelled them there, you love them whether they’re your own or somebody else's."

"The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces. The peasant stank as did the priest, the apprentice as did his master’s wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the king himself stank, stank like a rank lion, and the queen like an old goat, summer and winter."

"The odour of humans is always a fleshly odour—that is, a sinful odour."

"He decided in favor of life out of sheer spite and malice."

"In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages."

"A guard was like a sphinx. He functioned not by some deed, but rather by his mere bodily presence."

"If this one, most essential freedom was taken from you, the freedom, that is, to withdraw from other people when necessity called, then all other freedoms were worthless. Then life had no more meaning. Then it would be better to be dead."

"When they finally did dare it, at first with stolen glances and then candid ones, they had to smile. They were uncommonly proud. For the first time they had done something out of Love."

"The scheduled execution of one of the most abominable criminals of the age degenerated into the largest orgy the world had seen since the second century before Christ."

"No human being can go on living in the same house with a pigeon, a pigeon is the epitome of chaos and anarchy."

"Suddenly he knew that he had never found gratification in love, but always only in hatred—in hating and in being hated."

"She had a face so charming that visitors of all ages and both sexes would stand stock-still at the sight of her, unable to pull their eyes away, practically licking that face with their eyes, the way tongues work at ice cream, with that typically stupid, single-minded expression on their faces that goes with concentrated licking."

"He was in very truth his own God, and a more splendid God than the God that stank of incense and was quartered in churches."

"With one glance he had got himself trapped in the brown fundament of her eyes, he was in danger of sinking, as if into a soft, brown swamp, and had to close his eyes for a second to get out of it."

"He had found his way to sphinxlike imperturbability."

"People could close their eyes to greatness, to horrors, to beauty, and their ears to melodies or deceiving words. But they couldn't escape scent. For scent was a brother of breath."

"His thesis was that life could develop only at a certain distance from the earth, since the earth itself constantly emits a corrupting gas, a so-called fluidum letale, which lames vital energies and sooner or later utterly extinguishes them."

"There were no mad flashings of the eye, no lunatic grimace passed over his face. ... He looked quite innocent, like any happy person."

"It was good, really, that this external world still existed, if only as a place of refuge."

"Whoever has survived his own birth on a rubbish heap is not so easily shoved back out of this world again."

"She was one of those languid women made of dark honey, smooth and sweet and terribly sticky, who take control of a room with a syrupy gesture, a toss of the hair, a single slow whiplash of the eyes—and all the while remain as still as the center of a hurricane, apparently unaware of the force of gravity by which they irresistibly attract to themselves the yearnings and the souls of both men and women."

"He was so full of disgust, disgust at the world and at himself, that he could not weep."

"The wind blew cold, and he was freezing, but he did not notice that he was freezing, for within him was a counter-frost, fear."