After the collapse of socialism, capitalism remained without a rival. This unusual situation unleashed its greedy and - above all - its suicidal power. The belief is now that everything - and everyone - is fair game.

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

There must be reasons why we men are so hipped on breasts as if we'd all been weaned too soon.

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.

Removed from its more restrictive sense, masturbation has become an expression for everything that has proved, for lack of human contact, to be void of meaning. We have communication problems, suffer from egocentrism and narcissism, are frustrated by information glut and loss of environment; we stagnate despite the rising GNP.

What makes books - and with them writers - so dangerous that church and state, politburos and the mass media feel the need to oppose them?