For the religious, Passover is the grateful remembrance of a homeward journey after years of suffering.

I write - so it would seem - to recapture, to preserve and return to the past, though I might just as easily be writing to forget and put that past behind me.

The last thing I want to do is to write about real things. I am not interested in reality and in real human beings and their real day-to-day problems - I just want to say to them, 'Hold still, and I'm just going to unpack, see what's inside.'

Nothing would have shocked Proust more than to hear that his work was perceived as difficult or inaccessibly rarefied.

Irene Nemirovsky was a prolific writer punctiliously devoted to her craft.