Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange our experiences...Experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness.

No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance - nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest - that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.

All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.