Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].

I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs . . . and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy.

For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.