I was convinced that hatred among nations and among people perished in Auschwitz. It didn't. The victims died but the haters are still here.

Certain things, certain events, seem inexplicable only for a time: up to the moment when the veil is torn aside.

Everything is in it: the promise and the hope and the fear and the challenge and the defiance. The test is a double test: Just as God tested Abraham, Abraham tested God: "Let's see if you really want me to go ahead with it and kill my son." Then the angel says, "Do not raise your hand against the boy" [Genesis 22:12]. It was the Angel of God who says this, not God. God was embarrassed. [All laugh]

A voice behind me asked, "Where is God? Where is He? Where can He be now?" and a voice within me answered: "Where? Here He is - He has been hanged here, on these gallows."

Every nation has its prestigious military academies - or so few of them - that reach not only the virtues of peace but also the art of attaining it? I mean attaining and protecting it by means other than weapons, the tools of war. Why are we surprised whenever war recedes and yields to peace?

The act of writing is for me often nothing more than the secret or conscious desire to carve words on a tombstone: to the memory of a town forever vanished, to the memory of a childhood in exile, to the memory of all those I loved and who, before I could tell them I loved them, went away.

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love.