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Only at that moment did I experience a sort of virginal amazement at the fact that a book isn’t there until you write it. If I don’t make the girl appear, she doesn’t appear. If I don’t make her think, keep quiet, say something now and then, meet this or that person, then she doesn’t think, doesn’t…

Only at that moment did I experience a sort of virginal amazement at the fact that a book isn’t there until you write it. If I don’t make the girl appear, she doesn’t appear. If I don’t make her think, keep quiet, say something now and then, meet this or that person, then she doesn’t think, doesn’t…

[...] Berlin was a capital city, but those infernal terms like “desirable location” were still foreign to us, because all of East Berlin lay outside of the world in which desirable locations existed. Idyll. Innocence. Indecency. Inbreeding. My parents’ furniture was in the Biedermeier style, and ou…

The world is there in every word, no matter how small. The world is poured into each of these literary words as into a funnel, which draws together all of the writer’s life circumstances and experiences, everything the writer knows, and possibly hates, about culture and history, but also about vege…

I encounter such lost souls again as I read the Spoon River Anthology, in which Edgar Lee Masters gives the dead residents of a small town ten or twenty lines each to describe the lives they have led. Alcoholics, secret affairs, crooked business dealings, old maids, lunatics, as well as some people…