I don't believe in writing at night because it comes too easily. When I read it in the morning it's not good. I need daylight to begin. Between nine and ten o'clock I have a long breakfast with reading and music.

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.

Writers know that sometimes things are there in the drawer for decades before they finally come out and you are capable of writing about them.

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

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

How easily the routine of sin establishes itself.

Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.