Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.

I make a difference between genocide and Holocaust. Holocaust was mainly Jewish, that was the only people, to the last Jew, sentenced to die for one reason, for being Jewish, that's all.

It was like a page torn from a history book, from some historical novel about the captivity of babylon or Spanish Inquisition.

Except that a human being is both the public and the private. We are both, private and public in the same person.

Still I believe that Hanna Arendt, she was wrong when she tried to say that we are all actually capable of this, it's not true. I think it's not true. There are certain things human beings are not capable of. I mean people, even normal human beings. You have to do certain things in order to become what the enemy was and I didn't accept her philosophical outlook on that.

Writers write because they cannot allow the characters that inhabit them to suffocate them. These characters want to get out, to breathe fresh air and partake of the wine of friendship; were they to remain locked in, they would forcibly break down the walls. It is they who force the writer to tell their stories.

There is not anti-semitism as an ideology. The civilized world must think that anti-semitism is stupid.