Walter Moers

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

“Regenschein is dead, my friend. You’re delirious.”

“No one who writes a good book is really dead.”

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

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.