42 Quotes by Daniel Kehlmann

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

I think I can work anywhere, but you don’t get the same kind of inspiration everywhere. New York theater has become a big inspiration for me. I only started writing for the stage myself because I like to see the good, mostly off-Broadway plays in New York.

Whenever things were frightening, it was a good idea to measure them.

We think in terms of fate even if we don’t believe in it. Even something as trivial as missing the bus – we think: Well, it might be good for something. We always have that thought, no matter how critical we try to be. The idea that everything is always total chance – we’re not made for that.

You say fate is almost indispensable to literature – I think it’s completely indispensable, at least in a novel, because a novel always has a plot. Even if nothing happens, even if someone just spends a day walking around Dublin, or whatever, there’s still something going on.

That was the moment when he grasped that nobody wanted to use their minds. People wanted peace. They wanted to eat and sleep and have other people be nice to them. What they didn’t want to do was think.

German can take a lot more pathos than English can. When you say “pathetic” in English it’s a disparaging term, but when you say “pathetisch” in German it’s just a description, not necessarily negative. That says a lot already.

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.