I always read the translator's draft all the way through - a very laborious business.

Occasionally I write a small piece or the odd lecture in English, and I teach in English, but my fiction is always written in German.

In school I was in the dark room all the time, and I've always collected stray photographs; there's a great deal of memory in them.

I don't want to talk about my trials and tribulations. Once you reveal even part of what your real problems might be in life, they come back in a deformed way.

I've always felt that the traditional novel doesn't give you enough information about the narrator, and I think it's important to know the point of view from which these tales are told: the moral makeup of the teller.

Our concern with history is a concern with preformed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.