Simon Johannes Carmiggelt:
(The Hague, 7 October 1913 – Amsterdam, 30 November 1987).
Dutch journalist, writer and poet. Under the pseudonym Kronkel, he published an almost daily italic in daily newspaper Het Parool for almost forty years, describing ordinary things in surprising ways, with an eye for humour in the difference between ideal and reality. Over the years, the writing style became more sober and the humour sadder. The selection in annual anthologies and his reading for television earned him great popularity. He wrote cabaret texts for Wim Kan and Wim Sonneveld, among others, including Sonneveld’s conferences Croquetten and De jongens. In 1961, Carmiggelt was awarded the Constantijn Huygens Prize and in 1977 the P.C. Hooft Prize for the year 1974.
There is no more difficult art than truly balanced idleness.
That is one advantage of travelling: it broadens the view and sharpens us in how delightful home is.
What sadist invents our dreams?
A friend of mine knows exactly what I should do. And I know exactly what he should do. But we don’t know what we should do ourselves, unless we exchange our problematics. There should really be a scholarship for that.
Now, the peculiarity of true friends is that when you see them again after years of forced separation, you can pick up the thread of conversation as if there had never been a hiatus.
Truth is an agreement, thanks to which the naive among us, do not have to live with reality.
