I cannot get over the fact that I was born in 1944. I want to find out as much as I can about that year.

It must be extremely uncomfortable to live with a writer - all that preoccupation and brooding.

I came from anonymity, and I will continue to write as a private pursuit.

England is not very easy to get in and out of.

I've always been interested in photographs, collecting them not systematically but randomly. They get lost, then turn up again.

Up until the 17th century, Germany was far more advanced, but then everything devastated by the 30 Years War began to fall apart... The culture is not innocent.

My texts are written like palimpsests. They are written over and over again, until I feel that a kind of metaphysical meaning can be read through the writing.

My parents came from working-class, small-peasant, farm-labourer backgrounds and had made the grade during the fascist years; my father came out of the army as a captain.

When I was a boy, I'd hide under the kitchen table and wind string around the chairs. I have a sense now that I am pulling on those threads. The more I pull, the more it comes unraveled.

Mine is a European imagination, shaped largely by my very promiscuous reading in German, French, English and, with greater difficulty, Italian.