118 Quotes by Max Frisch

In general, only the future counted for her, and to a slight extent the present; but she had no interest at all in past experiences, like all young people.

I can’t bear being told what I ought to feel; although I can see the subject under discussion, I feel like a blind man.

There is no such thing, as far as I’m concerned, as ownership in love.

To write is to read one’s own self.

Being alone is the only possible condition for me, since I don’t want to make a woman unhappy, and women have a tendency to become unhappy. Being alone isn’t always fun, you can’t always be in form. Moreover, I have learned from experience that once you are not in form women don’t remain in form either; as soon as they are bored they start complaining you’ve no feeling.

Her supposition that I was melancholy because I was alone put me out of humour. I’m used to travelling alone. I live, like every real man, in my work. On the contrary, that’s the way I like it and I think myself lucky to live alone, in my view this is the only possible condition for men, I enjoy waking up and not having to say a word. Where is the woman who can understand that?

We live in an age of reproduction. Most of what makes up our personal picture of the world we have never seen with our own eyes – or rather, we’ve seen it with our own eyes, but not on the spot: our knowledge comes to us from a distance, we are televiewers, telehearers, teleknowers.

When I woke Herbert, he sprang to his feet. What was the matter? When he saw that nothing was the matter, he started snoring again – to avoid being bored.

Hanna had Communist leanings, which I couldn’t bear, and on the other a tendency to mysticism, or to put it less kindly, hysteria.