While making love, we often talk about money. I like it. I like that dirty talk

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.

Often it doesn't occur to you what kind of novel you're writing until quite late on.

So if you ever felt something behind you, when you weren't even one, like welcome heat, like a bulb, like a sun, trying to shine right across the universe - it was me. Always me. It was me. It was me.

It's an ancient idea that the leader of a democracy should not be the cleverest but the most average. That's an arguable point, but the world has decided otherwise - except in America, where it still divides the country right down the middle.

It was the tiredness of time lived, with its days and days. It was the tiredness of gravity- gravity, which wants you down in the center of the earth.

Oh Christ, the exhaustion of not knowing anything. It's so tiring and hard on the nerves. It really takes it out of you, not knowing anything. You're given comedy and miss all the jokes. Every hour you get weaker. Sometimes, as I sit alone in my flat in London and stare at the window, I think how dismal it is, how heavy, to watch the rain and not know why it falls.