Max Frisch (1911 – 1991)
Swiss architect, playwright and novelist, who is regarded as one of the most influential Swiss writers of the 20th century.
A poem, a genuine one, does not need to fear the world; it stands up to it, even when a bell rings and an unexpected guest arrives to tell us, while the same coffee is still in our cups, of his fourteen years in captivity...
Our guilt has its uses. It justifies much in the lives of others.
There are moments when her voice is all he needs.
You hold the pen like a needle in a seismic observatory, and in fact it is not we who write, but rather we are written. Writing means to read oneself
The sort of misery that brings no moral reward, misery that is of no value to the mind and soul, that is the true misery, it is hopeless, bestial and nothing else.
What hope have you know given up ?
How much self-knowledge is limited to presenting other people with a more precise and exact description of our weaknesses.
My reality doesn't lie in the part I play, but in the unconscious decision as to what kind of part I assign to myself.
What we call unfaithfuless: our attempt for once to get out from behind our own face, our desperate hope of eluding the definitive.
You can't make the incomprehensible comprehensible without losing it completely.
A crisis is a productive state. You simply have to get rid of its aftertaste of catastrophe.
Do you know what you need?
They wanted what is possible only once: the now.
A society needs famous people; the question is whom it chooses for that role. Any criticism of its choice is by implication a criticism of that society.
How much frankness can we stand in a friend?
Carrying on with the conversation like a woman when the bill comes...
Plots- it seems there are thousands of them, all one's acquaintances known some, strangers make a present of them in letters, each the basis for a play or a novel...
Man hat Arbeitskräfte gerufen, und es kamen Menschen.
If on some occasion I happen to read something in it — because, for instance, I neet to know a date — I am always disconcerted to find that two or five years ago I came to exactly the same conclusion, only to forget it because I had not succeded in living up to it; in fact, I had tenaciously been doing the very opposite.
Does not everyone who describes something he has experienced believe basically that whatever happens to him has some sort of relevance.