No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night. We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them. Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.

You take a text, you explore it, you enter it with all your heart and all your mind.

Therefore, all my adult life, since I began my life as an author, or as a teacher, I always try to listen to the victim.

In my little town, Sighet, which is in Romania, Hungary-Romania, but a real shtetl, a little [Jewish] village - and we began with the Chumash [Pentateuch], probably at age four.

I was involved in trying to save the Rwandan people and Sudan now. It's a mass murder. Mass murder is a terrifying word. We don't have to go further than that. Cambodia came close to, but what was it, Cambodians killing Cambodians after all. So therefore I think we should be very careful with vocabulary.

I'm not a political person. I usually beware of political persons. I know many, but I'm not one of them. I have no political ambitions.

A destruction, an annihilation that only man can provoke, only man can prevent.