Max Frisch (1911 – 1991)
Swiss architect, playwright and novelist, who is regarded as one of the most influential Swiss writers of the 20th century.
People with the same education as my own, speaking the same words that I do, loving the same books, the same music, the same paintings, are by no means immune from the danger of turning into monsters and doing things we would not have thought possible among the people of our own day, apart from a few pathological exceptions. If they are not immune, Why should I be so confident of my own immunity?
The selfknowledge that gradually or abruptly alienates a person from his previous life.
I feel fairly certain that my hatred harms me more than the people whom I hate.
That a plot has no real life of it's own; it exists only in it's precipitates. It cannot be distilled but only crystallized- in which form it is then immutable, whether successful or unsuccesful: once and for all
Why there are so many great actresses, so few great woman writers? The erotic urge that lies at the bottom of all art has a feminine and a masculine character. Feminine is the urge to be; masculine the urge to do. Interpretative art always has more of the feminine about it
I know that I'm the happiest of lovers...
...for no rational reason.
Not to know one another to a degree that went beyond all possibility of knowing one another was beautiful.
It is a sign of non love that is to say a sin, to form a finished image of ones neighbors.
Many people die at 25 but aren't buried until they're 75.
You can lose a woman when you have won her.
Half a lifetime is spent with the unspoken question: Will it happen will it not?
Overcoming prejudice: the only possible way through love, which creates no graven images.
The renunciation of recognition will never become possible without a certitude that our life is directed by a suprahuman authority.
Are you friend with yourself ?
The older you get the simpler you want to make it.
The horror of uncreative solitude.....
Life is boring. I have experiences now only when I am writing.
Technology [is] the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.
Nothing is harder than to accept oneself.