If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.

Jesus Christ only had twelve, you know, and one of them was a double.

Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.

...also took for granted that secret services were the only real measure of a nations political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.

Power expands through the distribution of secrecy.

My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak. What I see in my country, progressively over these years, is that the rich have got richer, the poor have got poorer. The rich have become indifferent through a philosophy of greed, and the poorer have become hopeless because they're not properly cared for. That's actually something that is happening in many Western societies. Your own, I am told, is not free from it.

More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.