The patience of poverty. In rice fields, backs bent forever. Amazing, man outoxens the oxen and still smiles. The mystery of India, say Indologists.

Everybody knows how fallible memory can sometimes be. You remember certain fragments precisely, but as soon as you try to join the fragments together, for a story, there is a certain - not falsification, but a shifting.

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 am not faithful but I am attached.

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

I don't believe in writing at night because it comes too easily. When I read it in the morning it's not good. I need daylight to begin. Between nine and ten o'clock I have a long breakfast with reading and music.

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.