In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot.

You can use your means in a good and bad way. In German-speaking art we had such a bad experience with the Third Reich when stories and images were used to tell lies. After the war literature was careful not to do the same which is why writers began to reflect on the stories they told and to make readers part of their texts. I do the same.

To me the job of the artist is to provide a useful and intelligent vocabulary for the world to be able to articulate feelings they experience everyday and otherwise wouldn't have the means to express in a meaningful and useful way.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and by analogy our own experience - more rather than less real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is even that it is what it is rather than to show what it means.

Being an actor means asking people to look at you. I guess I accept that. But it's a profession in which the job is to show another world and other people. You may access it through bits of yourself and your imagination and experience but actually in the end you're not playing yourself.

The possibility of a scientific treatment of history means a wider experience a greater maturity of practical reason and finally a fuller realization of certain basic ideas regarding the nature of life and time.

The immediacy of mystic experience simply means that we know God just as we know other objects. God is not a mathematical entity or a system of concepts mutually related to one another and having no reference to experience.

But human experience is usually paradoxical that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.

Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute and yet is relative in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.

Equality means nothing unless incorporated into the institutions.