Elias Canetti Quotes

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

In a time of destruction, create something.

I wanted the past to go away, I wanted to leave it, like another country; I wanted my life to close, and open like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song where it falls down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery; I wanted to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know, whoever I was, I was alive for a little while.

You know me, I've got to find some way to get a fresh fire.

I can't write the same book over and over again... let it go, once it's gone!

Birth is the sudden opening of a window, through which you look out upon a stupendous prospect. For what has happened? A miracle. You have exchanged nothing for the possibility of everything.

One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.

I had a lot of different thoughts and ideas and always to transform, but I'm trying certain things that I feel my heart is really going for and that was one of the things that I initiated a few months ago.

In the same way, there is some creature gnawing away inside of me, urging me to do things in different ways.

I love change, I need it.

Reasonable men adapt to the world around them; unreasonable men make the world adapt to them. The world is changed by unreasonable men.

Nature is infinitely creative. It is always producing the possibility of new beginnings.

People don't live in Los Angeles because we are tied to the same old, same old. We live in Los Angeles because of the intoxicating energy of new beginnings that permeate our city.

A playwright can drop a little acid in the water and it washes away a lot of rust.

Art is about building a new foundation, not just laying something on top of what's already there.

An end of something means the beginning of something else, and I don't think that something else is going to be the death of the manned space program.

'Change' is seen as a dirty word, but personally, I'm searching for it.

A new era doesn't come from nothing. New thoughts, values and methods will be established after overcoming various hurdles on the way.

Some people go off to an ashram or they, you know, have a midlife crisis and buy a sports car. For me, I do 'Hedwig,' and I see it's a midlife crisis maybe, and I see what's next. And it's a good trampoline, maybe, into the next part of my life.

Imagine a master painting that's never finished...when you can only build on previous work, you become limited by what you can paint...If you are in the midst of painting a forest full of tall tress and hanging vines, it is rather difficult to wake up the next day and suddenly turn that paining into the beach and ocean...We have to treat each day like a black canvas on which we can paint. Yesterday might have been paining flowers, but today you can paint cars or horses. A new day represents a chance for renewal.

Nothing retains its form; new shapes from old. Nature, the great inventor, ceaselessly contrives. In all creation, be assured, there is no death - no death, but only change and innovation; what we men call birth is but a different new beginning; death is but to cease to be the same. Perhaps this may have moved to that, and that to this, yet still the sum of things remains the same.

The urge for destruction is also a creative urge!

Everything is holding its breath inside me. Everything is waiting to explode like Christmas. I want to be all new and shiny. I want to sit out bad at night, a boy around my neck and the wind under my skirt. Not this way, every evening talking to the trees, leaning out my window, imagining what I can't see.

I don't think in art there is ever a precedent; each moment is a new one and terrifying and threatening and bursting with hope.

Being the new guy's always great because you get to go in fresh with your own choices and you get to bring new life and breath and a new energy into something that's already established.