What I do is sometimes - at least in Germany - met with wounding campaigns. I always face the question: should I grow myself a thick skin and ignore it, or should I let myself be wounded? I've decided to be wounded, since, if I grew a thick skin, there are other things I wouldn't feel any more.

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

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.

It's dangerous to watch staggering butterflies. They have a plan but it has no meaning.

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

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.

Art is uncompromising, and life is full of compromises.