"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."
Patrick Süskind is a German writer and screenwriter, known best for his novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, first published in 1985.
"The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces. The peasant stank as did the priest, the apprentice as did his master’s wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the king himself stank, stank like a rank lion, and the queen like an old goat, summer and winter."
"The odour of humans is always a fleshly odour—that is, a sinful odour."
"Their heads, up on top, at the back of the head, where the hair makes a cowlick...is where they smell best of all...Once youve smelled them there, you love them whether they’re your own or somebody elses."
"He decided in favor of life out of sheer spite and malice."
"Whoever has survived his own birth on a rubbish heap is not so easily shoved back out of this world again."
"In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages."