When the young woman leans over the sky, about to water the flowers as well as the weeds, her white front splits open until her milk runs.

I shall speak of how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another... of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next... of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis in progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.

The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.

It makes me realise that the fantasy of nature is much larger than my own fantasy. I still have things to learn.

In general, I agree with Jacob Grimm and feel that we ought to permit changes and uncontrolled growth in language. Even though that also allows potentially threatening new words to develop, language needs the chance to constantly renew itself.

Today I know that all things are watching, that nothing goes unseen, that even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings. It's not God in his heaven who sees everything. A kitchen chair, a clothes hanger, a half-filled ashtray, or the wooden replica of a woman named Niobe can serve perfectly well as an unforgetting witness to our every deed.

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