I'm not for real revolutions, because they always bring you the opposite of what you want. You very seldom get what you want if you have a violent revolution.

Writing when you are already very old means you have lived through the endings of so many things, you are more aware of the shape life takes. You begin to know Death, you've been close to it. But youth can barely imagine the end of this journey.

There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of subnormal, sadistic apes that makes my blood boil.

The Americans are clever. They thoroughly understand things that have to do with money, war, death, sickness. And there is also a real tradition of skepticism in this country.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist - I’m a conspiracy analyst.

Writing of history is our only heuristic principle. The Germans have a word for it, einfühlen. It is the ability to experience the past in the present and to recreate it. In my books, I have tried to recreate it in the most natural way possible: History must be integrated into the story without the weight of premonition.

We are given our place in time as we are given our eyes: weak, strong, clear, squinting, the thing is not ours to choose. Well, this has been a squinting, walleyed time to be born in.