He wrote his books just like a farmer who sowed and reaped, grafted, fed his animals and mucked out after them. From a sense of duty, and to have something to eat. "It was a job like any other."

"My most productive work times were morning and night: the hours between noon and night found me stupid."

"I could not tie myself to a paper or a publisher. I wouldn't want to make any promises that I couldn't keep. Things can only grow from me unforced."

[Jakob von Gunten]'s my favorite, among all my books." After a pause: "The less the action and the smaller the geographical region a writer uses, the more important is his talent. I am immediately suspicious of novelists who excel in plot and use the whole world as their character. Everyday events are beautiful and rich enough that a writer can strike sparks from them."

"Artists must fit in with the ordinary. They must not become clowns."

"In 1913 when I, with a hundred francs, returned to Biel, I thought it was advisable to be as inconspicuous as possible. No [gloating.] I went walking by myself, day and night. In between I conducted my business as a writer. Finally, when I had exhausted all my subjects, like a cowherd his pasture, I went back to Bern. At first things went well there for me. But imagine my fright when I got a letter from the feuilleton editor of the Berliner Tageblatt in which they said that I hadn't produced anything for half a year! I was confused. Yes, it's true, I was totally written out. Burned out like an oven. I made a genuine effort [despite the letter] to continue writing. But they were silly things, and that worried me. What works for me is what can grow quietly within me and what I've somehow experienced. Then I made a couple of amateurish attempts to take my life, but I couldn't make a proper noose. Finally it reached the point where my sister Lisa took me to the Waldau Institute. I asked her just outside the gate "Are we doing the right thing?" Her silence gave me the answer. What else could I do, but enter?"

"It's madness and cruelty to demand that I continue to write in the sanitarium. The basis of a writer's creativity is freedom. As long as this condition is not met I refuse to write again. [In that regard] no one has given me a room, paper or pen."

Across from the casino at Jakobsbad there's a baroque building that resembles a monastery, probably an old folks' home. "Should we go inside?" Robert: "It looks much nicer on the outside. One should not try to reveal all secrets; I've believed that my whole life. Isn't it good, that in our life so much remains foreign and strange, as though behind ivy-covered walls? That gives it an inexpressible appeal, which more and more goes lost. Today it's brutal, how everything is desired and taken."

On the matter of productivity: "It's not good for an artist to wear himself out in his youth. Then his heart is prematurely fallow. Gottfried Keller, C.F. Meyer, and Theodore Fontane saved up their creativity for old age, certainly not to their disadvantage."

"During my last months in Bern I had nothing to say. Gottfried Keller might have experienced something of the sort when he accepted the post of [Staatsschreiber]. Always pacing about the same room can lead to impotence."

"Writing in particular needs a man's full strength–it just sucks him dry."

"At the sanitarium I have the quiet that I need. Noise is for the young. It seems suitable for me to fade away as inconspicuously as possible."

"I was so happy this morning," said the enthusiastic Robert "when I saw clouds instead of blue sky. I don't care for beautiful views and backdrops. When the distant disappears, the close grows more intimate. Why shouldn't we be satisfied with one meadow, one forest, and a couple of peaceful houses."

"I liked my hospital room quite a bit. One lies like a felled tree, and needs no limbs to stir about. Desires all fall asleep, [like children exhausted from their play]. It feels like a monastery, or the waiting room of death. Why have an operation? I was happy as things stood. It's true I got nasty if the other patients got something to eat and I didn't. But even this didn't last long. I'm sure that Hölderlin's last 30 years were not as unhappy as portrayed by the literature professors. To be able to dream away in some quiet corner without having to constantly satisfy obligations is certainly not the martyrdom that people make it out to be!"

"Ordinary people like us should be as quiet as possible."

"You see, every time I moved into a new city I tried to forgot the past and immerse myself completely in my new milieu."

I asked Robert if it was true that he had burned three unpublished novels in Berlin. "That could well be true. At the time I was mad for novel-writing. But I realized that I had seized on a form that was to too long-winded for my talent. So I moved back into the little shell of short stories and feuilletons …"

"In Herisau" he continues "I haven't written anything. What for? My world was smashed by the Nazis. The papers that I wrote for are gone; their editors hunted down or killed. I've almost become a [Petrefakt]."

After a few steps, Robert: "Let's slow down; we don't want to chase after the beautiful, but have it with us, like a mother her child."

"In your youth you're eager for the unusual, and you're almost hostile to the everyday. As you age you come to trust the everyday more than the unusual, which arouses suspicion. That's how people change, and it's good that they do."

"How often such quiet, inconspicuous folk are underestimated when they're young, and yet they are that which holds the world together; from them comes the strength that helps a nation survive."

Robert never acquired his own library, at most a pile of little Reclam editions. "What else do you need?"

In the sun, Robert’s head reddens like a tomato. He smiles at me with enthusiasm: "It would be nice to keep going like this into the night."

"Back in Zschokke's day, they still understood how to write gracious novels. Today novelists terrorize readers with their dense tediousness. It's not a good sign for these times that literature acts in such an imperialistic way. It used to be modest and good-natured. Today it possesses [Herscherallueren]. Das Volk are said to be its subject. That is not a healthy development."

Robert: "It's good to be thrown back on simple things. Think of how many people shed their ballast in the war, and how beauty then had room to grow."

from Carl Seelig's Wandering With Robert Walser, in English for the first time, in a draft translation by Bob Skinner (via Vertigo).