Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
On sorrow floats laughter.
I am not faithful but I am attached.
Art is hard for a puritan to understand.
Everything bigger than life attracts a crowd.
Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.
The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.
You are vain and wicked- as a genius should be.
How easily the routine of sin establishes itself.
Who can deny that the environment has been destroyed?
Art is uncompromising and life is full of compromises.
Art is uncompromising, and life is full of compromises.
[To be an artist,] this desire to conquer all with images.
Melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.
I expected more from literature than from real, naked life.
In statistics, what disappears behind rows of numbers is death.
[America is] the land where people find whatever they have lost.
Homeland is something one becomes aware of only through its loss.
Students who don't want to get anywhere are sure to get somewhere.
Even if surrounded with explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped.
Translation is that which transforms everything so that nothing changes.
I've always been surrounded by children - never bothered by their noise.
If Jesus had been a hunchback, they could hardly have nailed him to the cross.
No idea stays pure. Even the flowering of art isn't pure. And the sun has spots.
Prose, poetry, and drawings stand side by side in a very democratic way in my work.
Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is black charcoal crushing white paper.
It's dangerous to watch staggering butterflies. They have a plan but it has no meaning.
One of the mistakes the Germans made ... was that they were not brave enough to be afraid.
There must be reasons why we men are so hipped on breasts as if we'd all been weaned too soon.
As a child I was a great liar. Fortunately my mother liked my lies. I promised her marvelous things.
Whenever there has been talk of exterminating rats, others, who were not rats, have been exterminated.
An empty bus hurtles through the starry night Perhaps the driver is singing and happy because he sings.
Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is a fight to the finish between black charcoal and white paper.
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?
It makes me realise that the fantasy of nature is much larger than my own fantasy. I still have things to learn.
I have found that words that are loaded with pathos and create a seductive euphoria are apt to promote nonsense.
Believing: it means believing in our own lies. And I can say that I am grateful that I got this lesson very early.
Today I know that all things are watching, that nothing goes unseen, that even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings.
I was brought up Catholic and know the stench of the Catholic Church. I moved away from religion early, but the impression remains.
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 have often supported Israel, I have often visited the country and want the country to exist and at last find peace with its neighbours.
What makes books - and with them writers - so dangerous that church and state, politburos and the mass media feel the need to oppose them?
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.
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.
...I remain restless and dissatisfied; what I knot with my right hand, I undo with my left, what my left hand creates, my right fist shatters
The European Union arose on an economic foundation, and it turns out that even this is not a solid base. Cultural identity has been neglected.
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.
I'm always astonished by a forest. It makes me realise that the fantasy of nature is much larger than my own fantasy. I still have things to learn.
We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.
The patience of poverty. In rice fields, backs bent forever. Amazing, man outoxens the oxen and still smiles. The mystery of India, say Indologists.
Our minds aren't bound by a chronological corset. When thinking and dreaming, past, present and future are mixed up. That's also possible for a writer.