And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.

Was everyone else really as alive as she was?...If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was.

I turned the pages so fast. And I suppose I was, in my mindless way, looking for a something, version of myself, a heroine I could slip inside as one might a pair of favourite shoes.

Writers are said to have superstitions and little rituals. Readers have them too.

I'm sorry to say that far worse things have happened and the literature of the Holocaust is a witness to the capacity of the novel as a form.

I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant who's a genius on his best days).

She bent her finger and then straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge. She brought her forefinger closer to her face and stared at it, urging it to move. It remained still because she was pretending... . And when she did crook it finally, the action seemed to start in the finger itself, not in some part of her mind.