Our critique of Israel has to be about the state, not culture or religion, but the state of Israel

[Cultural departments] don't care about culture. Maybe they're the furthest from the people who understand culture.

I don't personally feel any association with a kind of culture related to state, or culture related to power, which I think is always disgusting.

We are living in a popular culture where everything is overexposed.

[Cultural department] understand nothing but bureaucratic daily affairs. They don't care about culture.

Everything is selected by the central government without good judgment or an understanding of culture to make it really safe. They will become nobody to maintain their power and be raised to the next higher level.

Now I've come to such a mixed culture: America, Europe, South America, Africa. And the politics are changing everywhere all the time and becoming even more unpredictable. There's no such thing as "fixed" culture. China is also becoming more global. Its problems are becoming international problems, becoming German problems, becoming American problems. Nothing is clear-cut. Perhaps I'll find my way - or get totally lost.

The Kurds know that they won't achieve their own state by force of arms but through international recognition. And they have certainly heard what the German foreign minister said in connection with the arms deliveries: There is no Kurdish state. But that shouldn't prevent the Kurds from continuing to develop their own institutions. Still, the best thing for them would be to remain a part of Iraq, but in return we must treat them with respect - their nationality, their language and their culture.

The structure of my novels has nothing to do with the narrative mode of cinema. My novels would be very difficult to film without ruining them completely. I think this is the area where writers need to place ourselves: from a position of absolute modernity and contemporaneity, creating a culture of objects which cinema cannot.

I never enquire into the origin of things, all Origin is a fallacy (in this I follow Nietzsche: origin is a very contested Cartesian illusion of reliability). Everything reaches us filtered through culture.