Verlass dich nie auf die Ehrhaftigkeit eines anderen!
From the stars we come, to the stars we go. Life is but a journey into the unknown.
Ordinary folk prefer familiar tastes – they’d sooner eat the same things all the time – but a gourmet would sample a fried park bench just to know how it tastes.
Life is too precious to be left to chance.
On horseback you feel as if you’re moving in time to classical music; a camel seems to progress to the beat of a drum played by a drunk.
For some miracles can only occur in the dark.
No one who writes a good book is really dead.
Someone with an obsession for arranging things in alphabetical order was an abcedist, whereas someone with an obsession for arranging them in reverse alphabetical order was a zyxedist.
The written word is redundant on the high seas. Why? Because paper gets wet too easily.
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.
Wednesdays were the best thing about Atlantis. The middle of the week was a traditional holiday there. Everyone stopped work and celebrated the fact that half the week was over.
Wine is drinkable sunlight. It’s the most glorious summer’s day imaginable, captured in a bottle.
People always covet what they themselves do not possess.
Anyone can write. Some people can write a bit better than others; they’re called authors. Then there are some who can write better than authors; they’re called artists.
A bluebear has twenty-seven lives. I shall recount thirteen-and-a-half of them in this book but keep quiet about the rest. A bear must have his secrets, after all; they make him seem attractive and mysterious.
Writers are there to write, not experience things. If you want to experience things, become a pirate or a Bookhunter. If you want to write, write. If you can’t find the makings of a story inside yourself, you won’t find them anywhere.
Im as good as dead, but they haven’t buried me yet.
If flatness were funny, a dinner plate would be hilarious.
I never trained, however, because I was a spontaneous talent. Practising spoiled my style.
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.