Nature & Animals Quote by Max Frisch

Frisch’s joke lands like a polite smile that turns, mid-sentence, into an indictment. An author, he suggests, is the only creature in the marketplace who can hear the sales pitch being used to appraise, package, and resell him. The horse at least gets the dignity of ignorance; the writer gets language, and with it the curse of comprehension.

The intent is less to romanticize authorship than to puncture the myth of the sovereign artist. Frisch wrote in a postwar European culture where literature was still treated as moral witness, yet increasingly processed by publishers, critics, prize committees, and the polite machinery of “literary life.” The “horse dealer’s language” isn’t just commerce-speak. It’s a whole evaluative dialect: blurbs, trends, reputations, the coded chatter about “seriousness” and “relevance,” the way institutions translate a living mind into inventory. Frisch’s wit is that he chooses a horse, not a painting or a manuscript: something breathing, trainable, and sold on pedigree.

Subtext: the author is both subject and object. He speaks the same language as the people negotiating his price, which means he’s complicit even when he’s disgusted. Knowing the terms doesn’t free you; it makes you fluent in your own commodification. That’s why the line stings: it’s not anti-market moralizing, it’s a bleak recognition that modern cultural production runs on a shared code, and the writer cannot pretend not to understand it.

Frisch’s cynicism is also a warning. When you start thinking in dealer-language about your work, you’ve already stepped into the stall.