>Was it philosophy you were first interested in?
>I studied philosophy almost exclusively from the age of seventeen to twenty-one, and only the great philosophical systems. I disregarded most poetry and other literature. But I broke happily very soon with the university, which I consider a great intellectual misfortune, and even a danger.
>Were you reading Nietzsche then?
>When I was studying philosophy I wasn’t reading Nietzsche. I read “serious” philosophers. It’s when I finished studying it, at the point when I stopped believing in philosophy, that I began to read Nietzsche. Well, I realized that he wasn’t a philosopher, he was more: a temperament. So, I read him but never systematically. Now and then I’d read things by him, but really I don’t read him anymore. What I consider his most authentic work is his letters, because in them he’s truthful, while in his other work he’s prisoner to his vision. In his letters one sees that he’s just a poor guy, that he’s ill, exactly the opposite of everything he claimed.
>You write in The Trouble with Being Born that you stopped reading him because you found him “too naïve.”
>That’s a bit excessive, yes. It’s because that whole vision, of the will to power and all that, he imposed that grandiose vision on himself because he was a pitiful invalid. Its whole basis was false, nonexistent. His work is an unspeakable megalomania. When one reads the letters he wrote at the same time, one sees that he’s pathetic, it’s very touching, like a character out of Chekhov. I was attached to him in my youth, but not after. He’s a great writer, though, a great stylist.
>Yet critics often compare you to him, saying you follow in his tracks.
>No, that’s a mistake, I think. But it is obvious that his way of writing made an impression on me. He had things that other Germans didn’t, because he read a lot of the French writers, that’s very important.
>You’ve said that you also read a lot of poetry in your youth.
>That was after. It was, if you like, the disappointment of philosophy that made me turn to literature. To tell the truth, it’s from that point on I realized that Dostoyevsky was much more important than a great philosopher. And that the great poetry was something extraordinary.
Is he /ourguy/?