Life & Wisdom Quote by Peter Bichsel

The warning is baked into the verb: enticed. Bichsel isn’t romanticizing style; he’s naming it as a seduction, a force with its own agenda. For a writer, language is never just a tool you wield. It’s a room you walk into and suddenly realize the furniture has been arranged to steer you somewhere. That’s the intent: to puncture the comforting myth of authorial control and admit that sentences can lead their makers by the hand.

The subtext carries a quiet ethical charge. If you “let yourself” be enticed, you’re consenting to drift toward what sounds good, what flows, what flatters your intelligence. That drift can be productive - it’s how unexpected turns of thought arrive, how a piece finds its voice. But it’s also how writing slides into self-hypnosis: clever phrasing standing in for clarity, rhythm substituting for rigor, metaphors doing political work without being held accountable. The quote implies that style is not neutral; it persuades, distracts, and sometimes absolves.

Context matters: Bichsel came out of a Swiss-German tradition suspicious of grandiloquence, attentive to the moral stakes of plain speech after the catastrophes of the 20th century. In that light, “enticement” isn’t just aesthetic. It’s historical. When language becomes too enchanting, it can become manipulative - not only in propaganda, but in everyday storytelling that prettifies the world into something more coherent (and less true) than it is.

The line lands because it’s both a confession and a discipline: yes, be tempted; no, don’t be fooled.