So I have no grounds to complain; on the contrary, writers should consider the condition of permanent controversiality to be invigorating, part of the risk envolved in choosing the profesión. It is a fact of life that writers have always and with due consideration and great pleasure spit in the soup of the high and mighty. That is what makes the history of literature analogous to the development and refinement of censorship.

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.

Today I know that all things are watching, that nothing goes unseen, that even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings.

I belonged to the generation that grew up under National Socialism, and was blinded and led astray - and allowed itself to be led astray.

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

Art is hard for a puritan to understand.

I catch myself judging myself as that 13-year-old boy, who, of course, rightfully points out that he is only a child. And my membership - well, I was drafted into the Waffen-SS and didn't exactly volunteer, which was just as idiotic. I wanted to be on the submarines and then ended up with the Waffen-SS.