Quotes by Max Frisch

“Its precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life.”

“Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesnt have to experience it”

“Technology... the knack of so arranging the world that we dont have to experience it.”

“Ever since the young men have owned motorcycles, incest has been dying out.”

“He cannot bear old mens jokes. That is not new. But now he begins to think of them himself.”

“When you say a friend has a sense of humor do you mean that he makes you laugh, or that he can make you laugh?”

“The difference between an author and a horse is that the horse doesnt understand the horse dealers language.”

A joke is a good camouflage. Next best comes sentiment... But the best camouflage of all - in my opinion - is the plain and simple truth. Because nobody ever believes it.

The ants Geiser recently observed under a dripping fir tree are not concerned with what anyone might know about them; nor were the dinosaurs, which died out before a human being set eyes on them. All the papers, whether on the wall or on the carpet, can go. Who cares about the Holocene? Nature needs no names. Geiser knows that. The rocks do not need his memory.

You can put anything into words, except your own life

If you criticize what you’re doing too early you’ll never write the first li

Mathematically speaking, the probable (that in 6,000,000,000 throws with a regular six-sided die the die will come up proximately 1 ,000,000,000 times) and the improbable (that in six throws with the same die the one will come approximately up six times) are not different in kind, but only in frequency, whereby the more frequent appears a priori more probable.But the occasional occurrence of the improbable does not imply the intervention of a higher power, something in the nature of a miracle, as the layman is so ready to assume. The term probability includes improbability at the extreme limits of probability, and when the improbable does occur this is no cause for surprise, bewilderment or mystification. Cf. Ernst Mallys Probability and Law, Hans Reichenbach The theory Probability, Whitehead and Russells Principia Mathematica, von Mises Probability, Statistics and Truth

As long as God is a man, not a couple, the life of a woman, according to Hanna,is bound to remain as it is now, namely wretched, with woman as the proletarian of Creation, however smartly dressed.

Our guilt has its uses. It justifies much in the lives of others.

The main thing is to stand up to the light, to joy (like our child) in the knowledge that I shall be extinguished in the light over gorse, asphalt, and sea, to stand up to time, or rather to eternity in the instant. To be eternal means to have existed.

I don’t deny that it was more than a coincidence which made things turn out as they did, it was a whole train of coincidences. But what has providence to do with it? I don’t need any mystical explanation for the occurrence of the improbable; mathematics explains it adequately, as far as I’m concerned.Mathematically speaking, the probable (that in 6,000,000,000 throws with a regular six-sided die the one will come up approximately 1,000,000,000 times) and the improbable (that in six throws with the same die the one will come up six times) are not different in kind, but only in frequency, whereby the more frequent appears a priori more probable. But the occasional occurrence of the improbable does not imply the intervention of a higher power, something in the nature of a miracle, as the layman is so ready to assume. The term probability includes improbability at the extreme limits of probability, and when the improbable does occur this is no cause for surprise, bewilderment or mystification.

Oh, this yearning to be white, this yearning to have straight hair, this lifelong striving to be different from the way one is created this great difficulty in accepting oneself, I knew it and saw only my own longing from outside, saw the absurdity of our yearning to be different from what we are...

Technology - the knack of so arranging the world that we dont have to experience it.

When you say a friend has a sense of humor do you mean that he makes you laugh, or that he can make you laugh?

Time does not change us. It just unfolds us.