Ten days is time enough to die, to be born, to fall in love and to go mad. Ten days is a very long time.

The cynic sees only cynicism, the depressive can taint creation with one glance

We don’t catch hold of an idea, rather the idea catches hold of us and enslaves us and whips us into the arena so that we, forced to be gladiators, fight for it.

Prison left me with some strange little tics.’ She has taken all the door off their hinges in all the apartments she has lived in since. It’s not that she has anxiety attacks about small...

My father was a doctor,’ she says, ‘a very kind man. He died in the early ’70s, relatively young.’ She taps the cigarette packet on the table. ‘Of lung cancer.”Oh.”But the thing about that is,’...

Betrayal clearly has its own reward: the small deep human satisfaction of having one up on someone else. It is the psychology of the mistress, and this regime used it as fuel.

Why is it that with women, some kink, some vulnerability of the sex, is always presumed to lie at the heart of things- as if they have no other life, no relevance as important as...

In this landI have made myself sick with silenceIn this landI have wandered, lostIn this landI hunkered down to seeWhat will become of me.In this landI held myself tightSo as not to scream.-But I did...

Miriam is upset. Her voice is stretched and I can’t look at her. Perhaps they beat something out of her she didn’t get back.

I like trains. I like their rhythm, and I like the freedom of being suspended between two places, all anxieties of purpose taken care of: for this moment I know where I am going.

Beyond all of that, I could see the wall I had seen from inside the train, the wall that runs along the train line. I assumed that there, behind it, was the west, and I...

There are no people who are whole” he says. “Everyone has issues of their own to deal with. Mine might be a little harder, but the main thing is how on deals with them.

When I got out of prison, I was basically no longer human,’ Miriam says.

For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers. You have to look at how normal people manage with...

And the clearer you see that, the worse you feel.