Elizabeth Costello

She no longer believes very strongly in belief... Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run. As happens when one writes: believing whatever has to be believed in order to get the job done.

A French or English writer has thousands of years of written tradition behind him…We on the other hand are heirs to an oral tradition.

They lost their humanity, in our eyes, because of a certain willed ignorance on their part.

She is not sure, as she listens to her own voice, whether she believes any longer in what she is saying.