The knowledge that I have acquired must not remain imprisoned in my brain. I owe it to many men and women to do something with it. I feel the need to pay back what was given to me. Call it gratitude.

There is much to be done, there is much that can be done... One person of integrity, can make a difference, a difference of life and death. As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our lives will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.

There is divine beauty in learning... To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps.

I do not recall a Jewish home without a book on the table.

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.

I'm a privileged person, I feel privileged because of who I am. I write books, I write novels, I write essays and I teach and I go from university to university. I'm one of the old, but I still go around, but I only see those who are not like that, I don't see the junk youth. I only meet students, and even those who are not formally at the university, if they come to listen to me, they come to read me, it means they are not junk students.

The Holocaust is not a cheap soap opera. The Holocaust is not a romantic novel. It is something else.