Per capita the East Germans drank more than twice as much as their West German counterparts.

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.

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.

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

Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so.

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.

Memory, like so much else, is unreliable. Not only for what it hides and what it alters, but also for what it reveals.

one does not remember one’s own pain. It is the suffering of others that undoes us

At the end of our lives it is our loves we remember most, because they are what shaped us. We have grown to be who we are around them, as around a stake.

I am a woman on her way to eat cake.

I had very good eyes once. Though it's another thing to say what I saw. In my experience, it is entirely possible to watch something happen and not to see it at all.

If you really want to do something, you'll find a way. If you don't, you'll find an excuse.

Keep your hand moving. (Don’t pause to reread the line you have just written. That’s stalling and trying to get control of what you’re saying.)

The test of love is in how one relates not to saints and scholars but to rascals.

In the early '90s, we discovered mutations that could double the normal life span of worms.

The most heinous and the most cruel crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives.

Why should men arrogate to themselves the right to regulate female purity?

Above the titles of wife and mother, which, although dear, are transitory and accidental, there is the title human being, which precedes and out-ranks every other.

The thing that's very close in the process is writing and acting, not directing. Directing's very different.

I was very surprised that for a while I could only get cast as straight. It was that way for a few years.

My lifelong friend and mentor Frank Barsalona is gone. And the music business as we knew it went with him.