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 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.

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.

I don't know where this thing about me being a travel writer comes from. It's nothing to do with me; I hate travel writing. I don't do it - I do it a little bit, but not much. I don't believe in it. I think it's over. The world is so saturated now that you don't need it.

Ideas come from ordinary, everyday life. And from imagination. And from feelings. And from memories. Memories of dust in my sneakers and humming whitewalls down a hill called Monkey.

Comedy was something I picked up trying to perfect my art through spoken word. I got on YouTube just to show off my poetry, and then people thought I was funny, so I ran with it.

With its imagination and large sales, Apple has become the world's most valuable IT company. However people are starting to have doubts regarding Apple's silence on heavy metal pollution problems.