English is much drier. You can get away with a lot less. Pathos, lyricism, these are things you have to tone down if you want the English version of the book to work.

I wanted to write a book that would leave open many riddles and mysteries, even to me. Of course in some cases I do know the answers, but in many others I don't know and don't want to know.

A neglect of one's sentimental education early in life could bear the most unfortunate fruit.

People who have experienced nothing love to tell stories while people who have experienced a great deal suddenly have no stories to tell at all.

When you translate the American writers who are best with dialogue into German - someone like Elmore Leonard, or Tom Wolfe, who's also quite good with dialogue. It's very hard to translate them well.

Also, whenever you have direct speech, and I don't quite know why, but it always gets better in English. Dialogue, the flow of dialogue, English just has a better way with it.

Exactly as we might ask God, and do ask God, to change our fate. The difference is that in the story the writer actually replies and in the end even changes his mind.

Nobody, said Humboldt, had a destiny. One simply decided to feign one until one came to believe in it oneself. But so many things didn't fit in with it, one had to really force oneself.

My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.

There may be a great fire in our hearts, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.

I'm not such an artist type that I can't handle the real world. I read the financial pages, because most people don't talk about art.

The only royal road to elementary geometry is ingenuity.

It struck me that Albania was the sort of place that might keep a man from yawning.

Crisis is the path to happiness. Decay and disintegration do not spell doom, but ascent and beginning. The powerful forces of a new creation operate in the hush beyond the noise of the day.

You can't just throw people at all your problems, dear.

My face becomes a Picasso sketch, my body slicing into pieces.

Dogs have a way of finding the people who need them, Filling an emptiness we don't even know we have.