How often is the passing of one storm only a prelude to another.

You are a name, not a number. Never forget that name, whatever they tell you here. You will always be Chaya—life—to me.

Sometimes living takes more courage than dying.

Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory. A storyteller can attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the fact that some people survived even as most people died. And can remind us that the swallows still sing around the smokestacks.

Write, write, and write some more. Think of writing as a muscle that needs lots of exercise.

I believe that culture begins in the cradle . . .To do without tales and stories and books is to lose humanity's past, is to have no star map for our future.

Intuition works best when you remember that “tuition” is part of it. You need to have paid ahead of time (ie done your prep work) so as to prepare the ground for intuition.