There's no better way of getting to know a text than by typing it out. (1977, p. 359)

One notices montage, and one does not notice editing. Montage is linking images through ideas, editing is […] creating a flow, finding a rhythm. (1979, p. 489)

To turn 120 pages into 15 is no longer editing, it is post-synchronisation. (1979, p. 563)

Ten years on, it is always the article on the back of the newspaper cutting that is of interest, but half a column is missing. (1979, p. 234) (see ill. 5)

When you are driving or running around it can happen that, with a brief glance, you catch the image of a totally different way of life. […] Children acquire this glance when they look about hungrily, longing for another life alongside their own. I have finally been able to see this kind of images again in a film (on LE CIEL EST À vous [THE SKY IS YOURS, AKA THE WOMAN WHO DARED], Jean Grémillon, France 1943). (1978, p. 471)

The first time I ran away from home, it was a Monday and on the cover of Der Spiegel [Germany's equivalent of Newsweek or Time Magazine – ed.] was Juliette Mayniel, featured in a lead article about the Nouvelle Vague. At that time film was still an exotic topic for Der Spiegel, unlike today when the cinema has become a trendy topic for the entire bourgeois in-crowd. AndWest Berlin was a city quaking with fear, illuminated like a sausage stand near the railway station, where the owner lights up an Italian kerosene lamp because he's afraid of the shadowy figures (while dreaming of pouring hot cooking oil over his assailants). (1981, p. 119)

The police here in Basel drive white Volvos. To see them you would think the academic middle class had finally been armed and put in uniform. (1977, p. 39)

I have always wanted to have a creative job. I gave up track and field athletics, did not go near the girls in our row-house suburb who read Bravo [German equivalent of WhoWeekly – ed.]. I dropped out of school to lead a life with more variety. In Berlin, I lived in a cellar.