Everything, no matter how beautiful, is only with us for awhile.

Literature for me… tries to heal the harm done by stories. (How much harm? Most of the atrocities of history have been created by stories, e.g., the Jews killed Jesus.) I follow Sartre that the...

It is necessary to distinguish between history and fantasy wherever possible. And then use them against each other.

Milena found Cilia outside, holding her bamboo box. Milena hugged her. ‘I’m sorry about your shins,’ she said. Milena lifted the lid of the box, and saw it, the precious paper, ruled in staves. People...

She thought she was brave, but she did not have that kind of courage. To face the men who controlled the torturers, the lists, the surveillance, and say: I am going to do the very...

In a sense who you are has always been a story that you told to yourself. Now your self is a story that you tell to others.

This is what books only aimed to do and never could. Give you the glint of someone else’s sunrise, what living is really like, you get old and it hurts to bend your elbow; your...

Milena’s eyes seemed to go hot and heavy. Praise made her heartsick; she was so unused to it, and needed it so badly.

I’m in the back of a limousine with Charlie Chaplin and it’s 1928. Charlie is beautiful; his body language seems to skip, and reel and rhyme, heartbreaking and witty at the same time. It seems...

You always use that word “remember”,’ said Milena. ‘You say, “remember, team”. You never tell us to think.