Quotes by Wolfgang Hildesheimer

I had given up magic, because it had reached a state of perfection. I felt that I was able to transform men into animals. I did not make use of this capability, because I believed I could not justify an intervention of this kind in the life of another person.

No opera of Mozart's has stimulated biographers' wishful thinking in such rich measure as Die Zauberflete. It is considered his swan song, a concluding apotheosis, a return to divine simplicity.

The revolutionary Mozart is the Mozart of his last eight years.

When I was five years old, my parents gave me a magic chest. I learned to cast spells, although of a childish kind, before I had learned to read and write.