I grew up reading Proust all my life, and he's very dear to me.

My mother was totally different from the mothers of my friends. She would never separate from me. In a way, my life belongs to her. When I was a child, she complained that I was anorexic, so they sent me to places to get me to eat. When I look at pictures of myself, I was just a normal-looking child. It was her fantasy.

My mother arrived in Brussels in 1938 from a small town near Krakow. But strangely enough, in 1942 or 1943, she was taken back to Auschwitz, which was just 30 miles from where she grew up. Her parents died there and a lot of her family.

I never felt that I belonged. When I was at school... First I went to a Jewish school, when I was very little. But when I was 12, they put me in a school with a lot of traditions, and they were educated people and they were talking about Greece and the Parthenon and I don't know what.

My dear sir, it haunted me for the rest of my life.

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.