Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language.

My adrenaline started pumping anytime I was within a hundred yards of a bookshop. I loved books nearly as much as I loved clothes. And that's saying something. The feel of them and the smell of them. A bookshop was like like an Aladdin's Cave for me. Entire worlds and lives can be found just behind that glossy cover. All you had to do was look.

There must be a balance of honesty and charity in the workshop. Everyone must be aware of a fellow human being behind the work being discussed, and criticism has to be useful, not just derogatory or laudatory.

Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language.

hardly anything in L.A. was close to anywhere else you wanted to go.

The common workshop goal is revision, not suicide.

Jews, Germans, and Allies is an important historical document, especially in light of those revisionists who would impose a universal amnesia about the suffering and losses incurred during the Holocaust. The grim statistics that Ms. Grossmann presents in her carefully researched and well-organized book carry evidence of the terrible truth. But the testimony of the survivors she quotes contains the final, ineradicable facts of history.