He was very suspicious of inventions, for they always meant that some rule would have to be broken. - Patrick Süskind

Whatever the art or whatever the craft—and make a note of this before you go—talent means next to nothing, while experience, acquired in humility and with hard work, means everything.

He succeeded in being considered totally uninteresting. People left him alone. And that was all he wanted.

These Diderots and d'Alemberts and Voltaires and Rousseaus...finally managed to infect the whole society with their perfidious fidgets, with their sheer delight in discontent and their unwillingness to be satisfied with anything in this world, in short, with the boundless chaos that reigns inside their own heads!