quotes from classic

Two elements are needed to form a truth - a fact and an abstraction.

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The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.

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Simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.

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If the secret of being a bore is to tell all, the secret of pleasing is to say just enough to be - not understood, but divined.

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Art includes everything that stimulates the desire to live.

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The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.

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Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.

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I don't believe in writing at night because it comes too easily. When I read it in the morning it's not good. I need daylight to begin. Between nine and ten o'clock I have a long breakfast with reading and music.

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I was assigned to the Waffen-SS but was never involved in any crime. Besides, I always felt the need to write about my experiences in a larger context one day. This has only developed recently, now that I have overcome my inner aversion to writing an autobiography in the first place, specifically one having to do with my younger years.

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My relationship with Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm reaches far back into my childhood. I grew up with Grimm's fairy tales. I even saw a theater production of 'Tom Thumb' during Advent at the State Theater in Danzig, which my mother took me to see.

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Everybody knows how fallible memory can sometimes be. You remember certain fragments precisely, but as soon as you try to join the fragments together, for a story, there is a certain - not falsification, but a shifting.

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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.

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I catch myself judging myself as that 13-year-old boy, who, of course, rightfully points out that he is only a child. And my membership - well, I was drafted into the Waffen-SS and didn't exactly volunteer, which was just as idiotic. I wanted to be on the submarines and then ended up with the Waffen-SS.

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I think it's a shame that we have 'Bild' like you have the 'Sun'. Now serious newspapers like 'FAZ' and 'Spiegel' use a bit of the tone of 'Bild.' This is terrible.

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I had an uncle who was a postal official at the Polish post office in Gdansk. He was one of the defenders of the Polish postal service and, after it capitulated, was shot by the Germans under the provisions of martial law. Suddenly he was no longer a member of the family, and we were no longer allowed to play with his children.

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I belonged to the generation that grew up under National Socialism, and was blinded and led astray - and allowed itself to be led astray.

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I did not volunteer for the Waffen SS, but was, as were thousands of my year group, conscripted. I did not then know as a 17-year-old that it was a criminal unit. I thought it was an elite unit.

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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.

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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.

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I have found that words that are loaded with pathos and create a seductive euphoria are apt to promote nonsense.

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