We struck up a conversation, but took pains to keep to small talk at first. We touched on the most trivial of topics: I asked if he thought the fate of man was unalterable. He thought it was.
The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.
It makes me realise that the fantasy of nature is much larger than my own fantasy. I still have things to learn.
Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.
I have often supported Israel, I have often visited the country and want the country to exist and at last find peace with its neighbours.
As a child I was a great liar. Fortunately my mother liked my lies. I promised her marvelous things.
Granted: I AM an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peep-hole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.
Who can deny that the environment has been destroyed?
And when the sun goes down and the mood comes upon me, I’ll watch the play of the colors on the water, yield to the fleetly dissolving images, and turn into pure feeling, all soft and nice...
Translation is that which transforms everything so that nothing changes.
The human head is bigger than the globe. It conceives itself as containing more. It can think and rethink itself and ourselves from any desired point outside the gravitational pull of the earth. It starts by writing one thing and later reads itself as something else. The human head is monstrous.
How easily the routine of sin establishes itself.
What I do is sometimes – at least in Germany – met with wounding campaigns. I always face the question: should I grow myself a thick skin and ignore it, or should I let myself be wounded? I’ve decided to be wounded, since, if I grew a thick skin, there are other things I wouldn’t feel any more.
I expected more from literature than from real, naked life.
We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.
Whenever there has been talk of exterminating rats, others, who were not rats, have been exterminated.
Everyone is born into a certain era. I wouldn’t want to see anyone faced with the circumstances that prevailed at the time, when there were few or no alternatives.