Quotes from Cornelia Funke

Sometimes, when you're so sad you don't know what to do, it helps to be angry.

Writing stories is a kind of magic, too.

Nothing is more frightening than a fear you cannot name.

There was another reason [she] took her books whenever they went away. They were her home when she was somewhere strange. They were familiar voices, friends that never quarreled with her, clever, powerful friends -- daring and knowledgeable, tried and tested adventurers who had traveled far and wide. Her books cheered her up when she was sad and kept her from being bored.

Sometimes it's a good thing we don't remember things half as well as books do.

When you open a book it's like going to the theater first you see the curtain then it is pulled aside and the show begins.

You know a great many things in dreams, often despite the evidence of your eyes. You just know them.

Dustfinger still clearly remembered the feeling of being in love for the first time. How vulnerable his heart had suddenly been! Such a trembling, quivering thing, happy and miserably unhappy at once.

Her curiosity was too much for her. She felt almost as if she could hear the books whispering on the other side of the half-open door. They were promising her a thousand unknown stories, a thousand doors into worlds she had never seen before.

You know, it's a funny thing about writers. Most people don't stop to think of books being written by people much like themselves. They think that writers are all dead long ago--they don't expect to meet them in the street or out shopping. They know their stories but not their names, and certainly not their faces. And most writers like it that way.

Fire and water," he said, "don't really mix. You could say they're incompatible. But when they do love each other, they love passionately.

A reader doesn't really see the characters in a story; he feels them.

Hope. Nothing is more intoxicating.

The books in Mo and Meggie's house were stacked under tables, on chairs, in the corners of the rooms. There where books in the kitchen and books in the lavatory. Books on the TV set and in the closet, small piles of books, tall piles of books, books thick and thin, books old and new. They welcomed Meggie down to breakfast with invitingly opened pages; they kept boredom at bay when the weather was bad. And sometimes you fall over them.

you can not fully read a book without being alone. But through this very solitude you become intimately involved with people whom you might never have met otherwise, either because they have been dead for centuries or because they spoke languages you cannot understand. And, nonetheless, they have become your closest friends, your wisest advisors, the wizards that hypnotize you, the lovers you have always dreamed of. -Antonio munoz molinas, "the power of the pen

Perhaps there's another, much larger story behind the printed one, a story that changes just as our own world does. And the letters on the page tell us only as much as we'd see peering through a keyhole. Perhaps the story in the book is just the lid on a pan: It always stays the same, but underneath there's a whole world that goes on - developing and changing like our own world.

I will try to write books until I drop dead.

Killing is easy, " said Mo, "Dying is harder...

And my father always took me to the library. We were both book addicts.

Second, there are so many magical places in books that you can't go to, like Hogwarts and Middle Earth, so I wanted to set a story in a place where children can actually go.

Farid had brought an invisible guest with him. Fear.

Beauty and fear make uneasy companions