Quotes from Vicki Baum

Success is as ice cold and lonely as the North Pole.

men don't make different mistakes at different periods of their lives. They make the same mistake over and over again and they pay a bigger and bigger price for it.

serious difficulties don't vanish by themselves, they are standing around your bed when you open the eyes the next morning.

Perfection bores me, in art, in music; most of all, in people. Luckily, perfection is rare.

cats will be clean in a pigsty while pigs will be dirty in a marble hall.

patience is an integral part of talent.

There are shortcuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them.

Pity is the deadliest feeling that can be offered to a woman.

Fame always brings loneliness. Success is as ice cold and lonely as the North Pole.

A writer should always have some profession which brings him into close contact with the reality's of life.

when we are young our parents run our life; when we get older, our children do.

in the big city nobody has time to make friends. The big city is a big solitude.

You don't get ulcers from what you eat. You get them from what's eating you.

The deadliest feeling that can be offered to a woman is pity.

Marriage always demands the greatest understanding of the art of insincerity possible between two human beings.

Worries are the most stubborn habits in the world. Even after a poor man has won a huge lottery prize, he will still for months wake up in the night with a start, worrying about food and rent.

Serious difficulties don't vanish by themselves, they are standing around your bed when you open your eyes the next morning.

Love is a word from the old poems you read. In real life there is no love. Men come together like apes and birds. It is sweet sometimes to play with a woman, but the wind blows and there is an end of it.

The lovely thing about real happiness is that it is there all of a sudden, unexpected, weightless as a little summer cloud and just as radiant and intangible.

A man with money to pay for a meal can talk about hunger without demeaning himself.... But for a man with no money hunger is a disgrace.

The real thing is always going on somewhere else. When you're young you think it will come later. Later on you think it was earlier. When you are here, you think it is there--in India, in America, on Popocatepetl or somewhere. But when you get there, you find that life has doubled back and is quietly waiting here, here in the very place you ran away from.

Men don't make different mistakes at different periods of their lives. They make the same mistake over and over again and they pay a bigger and bigger price for it.

One imagines everything higher than it is, till one sees it. You come on your travels from your little provincial town with false ideas about life. Grand Hotel, you think. Most expensive hotel, you think. God knows what marvels you expect from a hotel like this. You'll soon know all about it. The whole hotel is only a rotten pub. It is exactly the same with the whole of life. The whole of life is a rotten pub, Herr Kringelein. You arrive, stay for a while and go on again.

Curious, how each one of us secretly carries his private cemetery around with him and watches it filling up with ever new graves. The last one to be our own.