With fear come the lies and the justifications that, no matter how convincing, lower our self-esteem.

We all had to pay, but not for the crimes we were accused of. There were other scores to settle.

A novel is not an allegory.... It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.

Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.

It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else’s shoes and understand the other’s different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless. Outside the sphere of literature only one aspect of individuals is revealed. But if you understand their different dimensions you cannot easily murder them.

She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time.

It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.