Often I had to imagine the things I needed. I learned very early to read amidst noise. And so I started writing and drawing at an early age.

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

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 work and leisure are soon to be subordinated to this one utopian principle - absolute busyness - then utopia and melancholy will come to coincide: an age without conflict will dawn, perpetually busy - and without consciousness.

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

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