Elliot Perlman

“As my name might suggest, I'm Jewish. My grandparents were Polish and Russian Jews who came to Australia in the late 1920s, and had they not, we wouldn't be talking now.”

“I can't really remember a time in my life when I didn't know something about what we call the Holocaust. It was this dark topic that I would know more about when I got older, but which was spoken about in hushed tones.”

“Combine a left-leaning upbringing with a family with direct experience of the Holocaust and someone with aspirations to write and I guess, sooner or later, that person will have a stab at writing something about the Holocaust.”

“Memory is a wilful dog. It won't be summoned or dismissed but it cannot survive without you. It can sustain you or feed on you. It visits when it is hungry, not when you are. It has a schedule all of its own that you can never know. It can capture, corner you or liberate you. It can leave you howling and it can make you smile.”

“Being an insomniac only slows me down. I try not to write at night, as I'm concerned that this will affect the quality.”

“I know that at literary festivals I'm speaking mostly to middle-class women, who frequently vote in a way that is contrary to how I'd like them to vote.”

“What is it about men that make women so lonely?”

“After a while, if you're a writer, you want to start appearing in the bookstores of the place you're living in.”

“Everyone was always hungry. The poorer you were, the hungrier you were, and with the hunger came weakness and irritability. It became difficult to think clearly and you needed to think clearly to work out how to survive the next day, how to get food. You were sure you could still work if you could find work, and you could look for it if only you could eat. But how were you going to get food, for yourself, for your children, for your wife or husband, for your parents? There were simply too many people within those walls for the calories that were let in. How were you to get food when there just wasn't enough of it? What were you going to have to do? With hunger of this severity came fatigue, a weakness that transcended tiredness and permeated your sinews and bones. As your limbs got ever lighter, they felt progressively heavier with each new day.”

“In my work, I'm always trying not to put barriers up between the 'good poor' and the 'bad poor.' I'm not sure my work will change things much, but at the very least, you want to make people feel that they are not alone.”

“I like dialogue in novels. I wanted to avoid laying history on with a trowel - appearing to be lecturing, as opposed to the characters lecturing their children or students. Dialogue can humanise the story and make it go down somewhat more smoothly.”

“I'm a Taurus, which sounds like the name of a pickup truck. I'd prefer to be born under the sign of the rock wallaby. If you're going to interpret your life pursuant to an utterly irrational dogma, why can't it have a cute mascot? Rock wallabies really are fabulous animals, and in any remotely just world, they would have their own star sign.”

“I'll be happy if I can gain even the smallest place inside the literary imagination of U.S. readers.”

“Being an insomniac only slows me down. I try not to write at night, as I'm concerned that this will affect the quality. I might have a Scotch to keep me going, but I like to be as awake and as alert as possible.”

“Memory is a wilful dog. It won't be summoned or dismissed but it cannot survive without you. It can sustain you or feed on you. It visits when it is hungry, not when you are.”