For me democracy is the only way of life. The opposite is dictatorship or anarchy.

Oh, it is not death that frightens me, but the impossibility of imparting some meaning to my past.

I wrote my first book, I published it in 1955, it was in Yiddish and it was called And The World Was Silent.

It is by his freedom that a man knows himself, by his sovereignty over his own life that a man measures himself.

In the face of suffering, one has no right to turn away, not to see.

Tibet's a tragedy. It's an insult to human decency.

I listen to music when I write. I need the musical background. Classical music. I'm behind the times. I'm still with Baroque music, Gregorian chant, the requiems, and with the quartets of Beethoven and Brahms. That is what I need for the climate, for the surroundings, for the landscape: the music.