At the time I could no more believe my eyes than now I can trust my memory.

A wonderful story collection set between one place and another and shaped by a fearless sense of comedy.

Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything!

I have always kept ducks, even as a child, and the colours of their plumage, in particular the dark green and snow white, seemed to me the only possible answer to the questions that are on my mind.

Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers.

No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding.

It makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds