[To be an artist,] this desire to conquer all with images.

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

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

I have often supported Israel, I have often visited the country and want the country to exist and at last find peace with its neighbours.

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.

Granted: I AM an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peep-hole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.

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