“For thousands upon thousands of those intellectual emigrés after the different conflicts, and after frightening persecution, wars of destruction and extermination, that interminable exodus would end up consuming them altogether.”
“Zagajewsky never spoke with second-hand knowledge, he did not accept any inherited view: he rethought it all himself, and that is why he is so comfortable talking in his poems about evenings, clouds, meadows and birds”
“Identity subtracts; tradition adds. Identity is a a cell to lock yourself up in. Tradition is a marvellous attic waiting to be discovered”
«Although I understand that the campaign is meant to counter centuries of invisibility, at bottom it seems to me that the lesbian executive that Kristin Scott Thomas plays is right: literature written by women becomes a subsection, a subcategory of literature»
«I do not want to sound apocalyptic or bang on, but it is hard not to see that we live in the midst of a real campaign against silence, against the idea of retreat, meditation, peace of mind»