There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange.

Canetti spent his childhood years from 1905 to 1911 in Ruse until the family moved to Britain. Before settling in Ruse they had lived in Livorno in the 17th century. The original family name was Cañete named after a village in Spain.

He wrote in German and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981 "for writings marked by a broad outlook a wealth of ideas and artistic power".