<table> </table> FRANKFURT, Germany | Josef Fritzl, the 73-year-old Austrian who imprisoned and raped his daughter for nearly a quarter-century, said he knew his actions were wrong.</p><p>But he denied he was a beast, and said he thought constantly about freeing her from the underground vault where she was locked up, along with three of her seven children, whom he fathered.</p><p>In his first public comments since being arrested last month &#8212; relayed by his lawyer and published in an Austrian magazine on Thursday &#8212; Fritzl offered a defense, by turns lurid and banal, of the indefensible. He also appeared to be laying the groundwork for a legal case based on his disturbed mental state.</p><p>&#8220;I constantly knew, during the entire 24 years, that what I did was not right, that I must have been crazy to do something like this,&#8221; the magazine quoted Fritzl as saying to his lawyer, Rudolf Mayer. &#8220;With each week that I held my daughter captive,&#8221; he said, &#8220;my situation got crazier.&#8221;</p><p>Fritzl also painted a picture of depraved domesticity.</p><p>&#8220;When I went into the bunker, I brought flowers for my daughter, and books and stuffed animals for the children,&#8221; he said. They watched adventure movies while his daughter, Elisabeth, cooked their favorite meals. &#8220;And then we all sat around the table and ate together,&#8221; he said.</p><p>Mayer, who spoke to Fritzl at a prison where he is in pretrial detention, confirmed the comments. &#8220;He said them to me; I said them to the magazine,&#8221; he said in a telephone interview from Vienna.</p><p>He denied sexually abusing Elisabeth, starting at age of 11, as she has testified to investigators. &#8220;I&#8217;m not a man who would abuse small children,&#8221; he said.</p><p>But as Elisabeth grew into a teenager, Fritzl said, he became alarmed when she began smoking, drinking and staying out all night. &#8220;I tried to get her out of that swamp,&#8221; he said, by arranging work for her as a waitress.