Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager. - Susan Sontag

"We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?"

[Speech upon being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade), Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]

All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulation: that is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings.

My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another. With him I have neither, neither privacy or passion. Neither the heightening of self which is won by privacy and loneliness, nor the splendid heroic beautiful loss of self that accompanies passion.