It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.

Pain is essential. Often I cannot avoid it.Therefore all one can do is redeem it; and the only way to redeem it is through literature, art, poetry, music.

What [Franz] Kafka says about the Tower of Babel: In the beginning there were actually many languages, and then as a punishment God gave the world a single language. And then they stopped understanding each other.

Abraham is trying to obey God, but not to kill. I feel that moment is one of the defining moments of Jewish faith.

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

I come from a tradition - from the Jewish tradition, which believes in words, in language, in communication.

I needed to know that there was such a thing as love and that it brought smiles and joy in its wake.