Cornelia Funke
Cornelia Funke
Cornelia Maria Funkeis a German author of children's fiction. She was born on December 10, 1958, in Dorsten, North Rhine-Westphalia. Funke is best known for her Inkheart trilogy, published in 2004–2008. Many of her books have now been translated into English. Her work fits mainly into the fantasy and adventure genres. She currently lives in Beverly Hills, California...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth10 December 1958
CityDorsten, Germany
CountryGermany
The world was a terrible place, cruel, pitiless, dark as a bad dream. Not a good place to live. Only in books could you find pity, comfort, happiness - and love. Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you security and friendship and didn't ask anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly.
Women were different, no doubt about it. Men broke so much more quickly. Grief didn't break women. Instead it wore them down, it hollowed them out very slowly.
Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?
She wanted to return to her dream. Perhaps it was still somewhere there behind her closed eyelids. Perhaps a little of its happiness still clung like gold dust to her lashes. Don't dreams in fairy tales sometimes leave a token behind?
She is a real bookworm. I think she lives on print. Her whole house is full of books - looks as if she likes them better than human company.
All books are in safe hands with me. They're my children, my inky children, and I look after them well. I keep the sunlight away from their pages, I dust and protect them from hungry hookworms and grubby human fingers.
So what? All writers are lunatics!
She always did like tales of adventure-stories full of brightness and darkness. She could tell you the names of all King Arthur's knights, and she knew everything about Beowulf and Grendel, the ancient gods and the not-quite-so-ancient heroes. She liked pirate stories, too, but most of all she loved books that had at least a knight or a dragon or a fairy in them. She was always on the dragon's side by the way.
Nothing is more frightening than a fear you cannot name.
I always wanted to ride a dragon myself, so I decided to do this for a year in my imagination.
In love - it sounded like a sickness without any cure, and wasn't that just how it sometimes felt?
You know a great many things in dreams, often despite the evidence of your eyes. You just know them.
A reader doesn't really see the characters in a story; he feels them.
She read and read and read, but she was stuffing herself with the letters on the page like an unhappy child stuffing itself with chocolate. They didn’t taste bad, but she was still unhappy.