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

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.

Lies that do not hurt, which are different from lies that protect oneself or hurt another person. That is not my business. But the truth is mostly very boring, and you can help it along with lies. There is no harm in that.

Melancholy has ceased to be an individual phenomenon, an exception. It has become the class privilege of the wage earner, a mass state of mind that finds its cause wherever life is governed by production quotas.

Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.

One of the mistakes the Germans made ... was that they were not brave enough to be afraid.

We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.