Walter Moers Quotes

Someone with an obsession for arranging things in alphabetical order was an abcedist, whereas someone with an obsession for arranging them in reverse alphabetical order was a zyxedist. ~ Walter Moers

That was a day that taught me the meaning of abject failure. ~ Walter Moers

Nothing is what one thinks it is. Cloth is stone and circus is an art. There are no certainties. ~ Walter Moers

Where shadows dim with shadows mate,
in caverns deep and dark.
Where old books dream of bygone days,
when they were wood and bark ... ~ Walter Moers

...but I was urged on by a courage born of despair. ~ Walter Moers

Picture to yourself the most beautiful girl imaginable! She was so beautiful that there would be no point, in view of my meagre talent for storytelling, in even trying to put her beauty into words. That would far exceed my capabilities, so I'll refrain from mentioning whether she was a blonde or a brunette or a redhead, or whether her hair was long or short or curly or smooth as silk. I shall also refrain from the usual comparisons where her complexion was concerned, for instance milk, velvet, satin, peaches and cream, honey or ivory, Instead, I shall leave it entirely up to your imagination to fill in this blank with your own ideal of feminine beauty. ~ Walter Moers

Few minded what their fellow citizens got up to as long as they themselves were left in peace. ~ Walter Moers

Life is too precious to be left to chance ~ Walter Moers

I had dispensed with a rudder on the principal that fate must be given a chance. ~ Walter Moers

Ordinary folk prefer familiar tastes - they'd sooner eat the same things all the time - but a gourmet would sample a fried park bench just to know how it tastes. ~ Walter Moers

I will quote one sentence from this text, namely, the one with which it ended. It was also the sentence which finally dissolved the writer's block that had inhibited the author from starting work. I have since used it whenever I myself have been gripped by fear of the blank sheet in front of me. It is infallible, and its effect is always the same: the knot unravels and a stream of words gushes out on to the virgin paper. It acts like a magic spell and I sometimes fancy it really is one. But, even if it isn't the work of a sorcerer, it is certainly the most brilliant sentence any writer has ever devised. It runs: 'This is where my story begins.' ~ Walter Moers

He was the best bad idea I ever had. ~ Walter Moers

...I simply wasn't born to remain in the same place for evermore... ~ Walter Moers

I've never thought much of strictly organised and methodical study. You can't arrange a library in alphabetical order until you've collected one. ~ Walter Moers

The written word is redundant on the high seas. Why? Because paper gets wet too easily. ~ Walter Moers

If flatness were funny, a dinner plate would be hilarious. ~ Walter Moers

The Central Indian Trifakirs, though something of a pest, were quite harmless. They always appeared in threes, of course, and made a practice of handing out muddle-headed philosophical tracts. ~ Walter Moers

A bluebear has twenty-seven lives. I shall recount thirteen-and-a-half of them in this book but keep quiet about the rest. A bear must have his secrets, after all; they make him seem attractive and mysterious. ~ Walter Moers

Im as good as dead, but they haven't buried me yet. ~ Walter Moers

WI felt I ought to comment on that, but nothing occurred to me. ~ Walter Moers

On horseback you feel as if you're moving in time to classical music; a camel seems to progress to the beat of a drum played by a drunk. ~ Walter Moers

I know people whose lives have been transformed by a good deed. ~ Walter Moers

Rumo!" said Rumo.
"That's right!" Smyke exclaimed. "You Rumo, me Smyke."
"You Rumo, me Smyke." Rumo repeated eagerly.
"No, no." Smyke chuckled. ~ Walter Moers

From the stars we come, to the stars we go. Life is but a journey into the unknown. ~ Walter Moers

It's quite simple, just follow the dotted line," the Planmaker explained. "Don't let any bad idea lead you astray. Don't let them persuade you to take a short cut or take one yourself. Life is a winding path. One sometimes has to make detours. That's my humble opinion, anyway. ~ Walter Moers

Reading is an intelligent way of not having to think. ~ Walter Moers

When bad habits become a habit, you have to turn over a new leaf. ~ Walter Moers

Anyone can write. Some people can write a bit better than others; they're called authors. Then there are some who can write better than authors; they're called artists. ~ Walter Moers

He gave me a look of mingled anticipation, curiosity, and compassion, like a cat with a captive bird in its claws. ~ Walter Moers

Writers are there to write, not experience things. If you want to experience things, become a pirate or a Bookhunter. If you want to write, write. If you can't find the makings of a story inside yourself, you won't find them anywhere. ~ Walter Moers

Wine is drinkable sunlight. It's the most glorious summer's day imaginable, captured in a bottle. ~ Walter Moers

There's a reason for every journey, and mine was prompted by boredom and the recklessness of youth, by a wish to break the bounds of my normal existence and familiarise myself with life and the world at large. ~ Walter Moers

Wednesdays were the best thing about Atlantis. The middle of the week was a traditional holiday there. Everyone stopped work and celebrated the fact that half the week was over. ~ Walter Moers

If he survived Roaming Rock, he kept telling himself, death would have lost its sting. ~ Walter Moers

Knowledge is night! ~ Walter Moers

For some miracles can only occur in the dark. ~ Walter Moers

I never trained, however, because I was a spontaneous talent. Practising spoiled my style. ~ Walter Moers

Really good literature is seldom appreciated in its own day. The best authors die poor, the bad ones make money - it's always been like that. ~ Walter Moers

Stealing from one author is plagiarism; from many authors, research. ~ Walter Moers

never trust a Troglotroll ~ Walter Moers

This is wine," Ghoolion said solemnly. "Wine is drinkable sunlight. It's the most glorious summer's day imaginable, captured in a bottle. Wine can be a melody in a cut-glass goblet, but it can also be a cacophony in a dirty tumbler, or a rainy autumn night, or a funeral march that scorches your tongue. ~ Walter Moers

People always covet what they themselves do not possess. ~ Walter Moers

I now understood the secret of music and knew what makes it so infinitely superior to all the other arts: its incorporeality. Once it has left an instrument it becomes its own master, a free and independent creature of sound, weightless, incorporeal and perfectly in tune with the universe. ~ Walter Moers

However great the challenge, it's easier to overcome with a decent meal inside of you. ~ Walter Moers

No one who writes a good book is really dead. ~ Walter Moers

Come he slow or come he fast it is but death that comes at last ~ Walter Scott

The great lesson to learn of life is the need of giving out from the abundance of one's self in order to be ever abundant within one's self. ~ Walter Russell

Great talent has always a little madness mixed up with it. ~ Walter Scott

Any sensible family has a budget that lays out how much will be spent for household and other purposes. Without such planning, things would quickly go awry. ~ Walter Ulbricht

If you truly have a passion for what you do, you will care even about the parts unseen. ~ Walter Isaacson

Adversity tests us from time to time and it is inevitable that this testing continues during life. ~ Walter Annenberg

I was raised in Harlem. I never found a book that took place in Harlem. I never had a church like mine in a book. I never had people like the people I knew. People who could not find their lives in books and celebrated felt bad about themselves. I needed to write to include the lives of these young people. ~ Walter Dean Myers

Claire happy to no longer expect ... but embrace the sweet lovely mess that is real life. ~ Jess Walter

It is a mistake easily made by every man, saint or scholar, Church leader or day laborer. Ultimately, we come to expect God to accept our understanding of what his will ought to be and to help us fulfill that, instead of learning to see and accept his will in the real situations in which he places us daily. The simple soul who each day makes a morning offering of "all the prayers, works, joys, and sufferings of this day" - and who then acts upon it by accepting unquestioningly and responding lovingly to all the situations of the day as truly sent by God - has perceived with an almost childlike faith the profound truth about the will of God. To predict what God's will is going to be, to rationalize about what his will must be, is at once a work of human folly and yet the subtlest of all temptations. The plain and simple truth is that his will is that he actually wills to send us each day, in the way of circumstances, places, people, and problems. The trick is to learn to see that - not just in theory, or not just occasionally in a flash of insight granted by God's grace, but every day. ~ Father Walter J. Ciszek

Affection can withstand very severe storms of vigor, but not a long polar frost of indifference. ~ Walter Scott

My breakthrough as a reader was when I discovered the European adventure story writers - Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, to name a few. ~ Terry Brooks

(F)or 50 years, the well-meaning leftist agenda has been able to do to blacks what Jim Crow and harsh discrimination could never have done: family breakdown, illegitimacy and low academic achievement. ~ Walter E. Williams

He began to see a kind of beauty in the strangeness of the field, too. It was quite different from what he had been taught to expect - as he had already discovered, were many of the things in this world - yet there weas pleasure for him now in its alien colors and textures, its new sights and smells. In sounds, too; for his ears were very acute and he heard many strange and pleasant noises in the grass, the diverse rubbings and clickings of those insects that had survived the cold weather of early November; and even, with his head now against the ground, the very small, subtle murmurings in the earth itself. ~ Walter Tevis

A landscape painting is essentially emotional in origin. It exists as a record of an effect in nature whose splendour has moved a human heart, and according as it is well or ill done it moves the hearts of others. ~ Walter J. Phillips

Over a pint in the pub, you have a good moan
That's the fate of every Magpie
While Mam perfects her game show skills
Giving talks at the WI ~ John Walter Bratton

Faces that have charmed us the most escape us the soonest. ~ Walter Scott

It has an air about it of having strolled in from the street with a few tricks up its sleeve, and if everybody would relax, please, it would do its best to pass the time whimsically. ~ Walter Kerr

The tale of their teamwork is important because we don't often focus on how central that skill is to innovation. ~ Walter Isaacson

The best security for people's doing their duty is that they should not know anything else to do. ~ Walter Bagehot

Really don't apply to Apple's culture. Levitt later ~ Walter Isaacson

Casey glanced at her plate again, recalling the posters of her elementary school lunchroom: YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT. So, how much you ate indicated the quantity of your desire. Walter was also implying that how quickly you got your food revealed the likelihood of achieving your goals. She was in fact terribly hungry, but she'd pretended to be otherwise to be ladylike and had moved away from the table to be agreeable, and now she'd continue to be hungry (Free Food For Millionaires, p.92.) ~ Min Jin Lee

In the past the French came to Germany less with the desire to understand it than with a zealous desire to interpret, to analyze it dispassionately something for which their training at the Ecole Normale Superieure or the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the French language superbly equipped them to do. ~ Walter Abish

Any idiot can get an airplane off the ground, but an aviator earns his keep by bringing it back anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances that man and God can dream up. ~ Walter Cunningham

Steve Jobs's attitude toward wealth was complex. He was an antimaterialistic hippie who capitalized on the inventions of a friend who wanted to give them away for free, and he was a Zen devotee who made a pilgrimage to India and then decided that his calling was to create a business. And yet somehow these attitudes seemed to weave together rather than conflict. ~ Walter Isaacson

Something about the memory caused him to tear up, to think again about the unknowable nature of the people we love. ~ Jess Walter

At least believe this many humans, who are interested obviously in this topic. Many of them visited me after lectures and meetings, in hope that I can give concrete answers to their questions. For it was clear: If that does not know it, who is to then know it? ~ Ulrich Walter

The mist just keeps on lifting and soon I'll be able to see all the way, as far as the earth's curvature allows. It's a blessing, that curvature, that hidden hemisphere-if we could take it all in at one, why move? ~ Walter Kirn

The ladies staged tableaux vivants, in which they dressed in costume to re-create famous paintings. ~ Walter Isaacson

To the timid and hesitating everything is impossible because it seems so. ~ Walter Scott

In listening mood she seemed to stand, The guardian Naiad of the strand. ~ Walter Scott

The beast is the monster that destroys your dream ~ Walter Dean Myers

I've always found old bookstores exciting. Whenever I'm in a city that's new to me, I immedicately look through the telephone directory for BOOKS, USED AND RARE. Book dealers send me their catalogs, and I read them as carefully as I would a letter from an old friend, never knowing what treasure I might find. Sometimes the catalogs contain printed material other than books, such as old photographs, newspapers, pamphlets, postcards, and letters. ~ Walter Dean Myers

Our law very often reminds one of those outskirts of cities where you cannot for a long time tell how the streets come to wind about in so capricious and serpent-like a manner. At last it strikes you that they grew up, house by house, on the devious tracks of the old green lanes; and if you follow on to the existing fields, you may often find the change half complete. ~ Walter Bagehot