Elias Canetti

"I noticed in the front row a small, very pale, almost white man, old, tremendously alert, old in the only way I love old age, namely more alive for all the years, more attentive, more unrelenting, exp…"

"It amazes me how a person to whom literature means anything can take it up as an object of study."

"You don’t have to know a philosopher’s every syllable to know why he rubs you the wrong way. You may know it best after a few of his sentences, and les and less well after that. The important thing is…"

"“Life experience” does not amount to very much and could be learned from novels alone, e.g., from Balzac, without any help from life."

"There is something impure in the laments about the dangers of our time, as if they could serve to excuse our personal failure."

"I love writers who limit themselves, who write beneath their intelligence."

"The story of your youth must not turn into a catalog of what became important in your later life. It must also contain the dissipation, the failure, and the waste."

"Relearn astonishment, stop grasping for knowledge, lose the habit of the past."