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.

My students are very special. They are my source of pride, my source of joy, my source of hope. I am terribly fond of my students.

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

More people are aware of the consequences of hatred. People are aware. Therefore more people are engaged in fighting ... racism and so forth.

If you make a determination that [story of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac] is not historical, do you throw it away? I don't think we can say whether it's precisely, scientifically historical.

If the Book of the Law could be forgotten for so many years, who knows what was done to it during those years? Maybe it was lost later, too. And another one replaced it, and that one is no longer the original text. These are questions that perturb me much more than whether it's history or not history.

Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.