Life's Pleasures Quote by Cornelia Funke

Reading, for Cornelia Funke, isn’t a self-improvement regimen; it’s a palate. The line lands because it refuses the prestige-y language that often clings to books and replaces it with something bodily, ordinary, and quietly insistent: appetite. “I don’t like to eat the same dish every day” smuggles in a value judgment without sounding preachy. Variety isn’t a moral badge here, it’s simple good sense. Anyone who’s ever gotten sick of their “usual order” understands the argument before it becomes one.

The subtext is a gentle rebuke to the comfort trap: the tendency to reread the same genre, the same worldview, the same kind of character arc because it feels safe. Funke’s food metaphor makes that habit look less like loyalty and more like nutritional deficiency. If you only ever consume one flavor, your imagination starts to flatten, your empathy narrows, your inner library turns into a single shelf.

Context matters: Funke is a writer whose work (from Inkheart onward) is obsessed with the permeability between text and life, the way stories feed us and, in turn, ask something from us. Framing reading as diet also slyly democratizes it. You don’t need an MFA-approved canon; you need curiosity and range. Different things can mean fantasy and nonfiction, children’s lit and classics, joyful fluff and difficult history. The point is not to perform taste, but to stay metabolically alive as a reader.