Thomas Mann was a highly influential German writer of novels and novellas including The Magic Mountain, Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, and Doktor Faustus. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. From 1942 to 1952 he and his family lived in Pacific Palisades. Honorary Californian.
 

"A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others brush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy him more than their due; they sink silently in, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous — to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd."

– Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales