Walter Moers

Quotes

1. “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.”

   p. 368

2. 

   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.

   p. 339

3. 

   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.

   p. 426

4. 

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

   p. 237

5. 

   Reading is an intelligent way of not having to think.

   p. 268

6. 

   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.

   p. 317

7. 

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

   p. 384

8. 

   “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.”

   p. 146

9. 

   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.

   p. 382

10. 

    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.

    p. 395

11. 

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

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

    p. 372

12. 

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

    p. 146