Elias Canetti
Elias Canetti
Elias Canettiwas a German language author, born in Bulgaria, and later a British citizen. He was a modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist and non-fiction writer. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981, "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power"...
NationalitySwiss
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 July 1905
CountrySwitzerland
thinking speaks-out enemy
It is always the enemy who started it, even if he was not the first to speak out, he was certainly planning it; and if he was not actually planning it, he was thinking of it; and, if he was not thinking of it, he would have thought of it.
want smashing whole
I want to keep smashing myself until I am whole.
deaf applause
Success listens only to applause. To all else it is deaf
fear pessimism boring
Pessimists are not boring. Pessimists are right. Pessimists are superfluous.
fate names people
People's fates are simplified by their names
philosophical despair may
Everything one records contains a grain of hope, no matter how deeply it may come from despair.
hate self people
People love as self-recognition what they hate as an accusation.
creativity ideas what-matters
It doesn't matter how new an idea is: what matters is how new it becomes.
stars constellations
A head full of stars, just not in constellation yet.
real lying men
Slumbering in every human being lies an infinity of possibilities, which one must not arouse in vain. For it is terrible when the whole man resonates with echoes and echoes, none becoming a real voice.
men opposites feelings
It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched. That is the only situation in which the fear changes into its opposite… The reversal of fear of being touched belongs to the nature of crowds. The feeling of relief is most striking where the density of the crowd is greatest
scratches statistics
He would like to start from scratch. Where is scratch?
book reading desert
In five minutes the earth would be a desert, and you cling to books.
men add lice
A 'modern' man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he has nothing to oppose it with. The well-adapted drop off the dead limb of time like lice.