I hire tea by the tea bag.

It's a young country and a German only feels comfortable being with the masses. They have very little talent at creating an inner life, privacy. And I think there must be something wrong.

We all have names we don't know about.

No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see. And the great satirists, like Swift and Dickens, tend to write about abuses and injustices that have already been partially corrected - you write about it after it's over.

I want incremental improvements. There's the record of all the revolutionary and violent change and extremism in general - it's dreadful.

I say the sentences again and again in my head until they sound right.

Love is blind; but it makes you see the blind man; teetering on the roadside . . .