The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.
Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that’s hard for a puritan to understand.
You are vain and wicked- as a genius should be.
When Satan’s not in the mood, virtue triumphs. Hasn’t even Satan a right not to be in the mood once in a while?
Everybody knows how fallible memory can sometimes be. You remember certain fragments precisely, but as soon as you try to join the fragments together, for a story, there is a certain – not falsification, but a shifting.
I have heard my fill of hurtful words. I think it’s especially egregious when citizens like me, who point out abuses in their country, are referred to as ‘do-gooders.’ This is how a phrase that can be used to stop an argument dead becomes part of common usage.
In general, I agree with Jacob Grimm and feel that we ought to permit changes and uncontrolled growth in language. Even though that also allows potentially threatening new words to develop, language needs the chance to constantly renew itself.
Writers know that sometimes things are there in the drawer for decades before they finally come out and you are capable of writing about them.
My relationship with Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm reaches far back into my childhood. I grew up with Grimm’s fairy tales. I even saw a theater production of ‘Tom Thumb’ during Advent at the State Theater in Danzig, which my mother took me to see.
Melancholy has ceased to be an individual phenomenon, an exception. It has become the class privilege of the wage earner, a mass state of mind that finds its cause wherever life is governed by production quotas.
Lies that do not hurt, which are different from lies that protect oneself or hurt another person. That is not my business. But the truth is mostly very boring, and you can help it along with lies. There is no harm in that.
It’s dangerous to watch staggering butterflies. They have a plan but it has no meaning.
Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is black charcoal crushing white paper.
Often I had to imagine the things I needed. I learned very early to read amidst noise. And so I started writing and drawing at an early age.
When the young woman leans over the sky, about to water the flowers as well as the weeds, her white front splits open until her milk runs.
An empty bus hurtles through the starry night Perhaps the driver is singing and happy because he sings.
On sorrow floats laughter.
I don’t believe in writing at night because it comes too easily. When I read it in the morning it’s not good. I need daylight to begin. Between nine and ten o’clock I have a long breakfast with reading and music.
I have found that words that are loaded with pathos and create a seductive euphoria are apt to promote nonsense.
I belonged to the generation that grew up under National Socialism, and was blinded and led astray – and allowed itself to be led astray.
I did not volunteer for the Waffen SS, but was, as were thousands of my year group, conscripted. I did not then know as a 17-year-old that it was a criminal unit. I thought it was an elite unit.