Believing: it means believing in our own lies. And I can say that I am grateful that I got this lesson very early.

I did not volunteer for the Waffen SS, but was, as were thousands of my year group, conscripted. I did not then know as a 17-year-old that it was a criminal unit. I thought it was an elite unit.

What makes books - and with them writers - so dangerous that church and state, politburos and the mass media feel the need to oppose them?

On sorrow floats laughter.

You are vain and wicked- as a genius should be.

I had an uncle who was a postal official at the Polish post office in Gdansk. He was one of the defenders of the Polish postal service and, after it capitulated, was shot by the Germans under the provisions of martial law. Suddenly he was no longer a member of the family, and we were no longer allowed to play with his children.

If Jesus had been a hunchback, they could hardly have nailed him to the cross.