"I write to destroy memory"

Jacques Rouboud In Bomb Magazine.

I write every night. I never correct, I never go back—I just go on and on. Everything I speak about is, in a way, linked to the old abandoned project. I want to say something about it, but I digress as soon as I start saying something, because I remember something else that I then begin to explain, and so on. So the structure is a bit meandering. I begin The Loop with a very old childhood image of snow in Carcassonne, where snow is very rare. I’m in my room and it’s very cold outside. At night there’s frost on the windowpane—I write and make pictures on it. So that’s the image: there’s an outer and an inner space, memory and the present. That’s the first image of the book, which at the end, returns to it.

David Mitchell Interview

"No, no, no, no, no, no. You don’t run short of imagination. You can get jaded, myopic and maybe sluggish. But imagination is...? it’s more a place actually, or a lab. Stories are infinite. You help yourself to as much as you want. You. Your kid. The human mud of your marriage. It’s all material. For that to run dry — it’s unthinkable. It would be like a fish worrying about water when it’s in the sea. The world has infinite plots for me.”

Aharon Appelfeld Interview

Q: Have you ever felt that you have exhausted this subject or period -- the period of the Holocaust -- or that you might want to write about another period of your life?

A I write about ideas. It's not memoir, it's not history, it's not psychology, it's about the human being in the world, all of the good and bad that a person encounters in life. This is what I have written 40 books about. I have written books that take place in Israel, and I have written about other periods, not just about the period of the war. Also about other times in Jewish history. I don't write history, or memoirs of the Holocaust. Of course, in the Holocaust, many horrible things happened. So many "interesting" things. Take the case of a boy living with a prostitute. This doesn't happen every day. And if I myself hadn't lived with a prostitute, I couldn't have written the book. Things like this couldn't have happened in regular times.