Anything can be said and, in consequence, written about anything.

To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.

when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.

Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.

Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity

The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital.

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.

The Jew has his anchorage not in place but in time, in his highly developed sense of history as personal context. Six thousand years of self-awareness are a homeland.

You’re in the country of the kangaroo and the duck-billed platypus, and you’re asking ‘why is it a mushroom? Because it just IS.

Education ought to foster the wish for truth, not the conviction that some particular creed is the truth.

I feel very humble, but I think I have the strength of character to fight it.

For artists, there's a very fine line between delusion and belief.

Logical thinking keeps you from wasting time worrying, or hoping. It prevents disappointment. Imagination, on the other hand, only gets you hyped up over things that will never realistically happen.

A "classic" is a book that everybody praises but nobody has read

I think a lot of the problem is that at 8 o'clock there's nothing on for kids.

What kept me sane was knowing that things would change, and it was a question of keeping myself together until they did.

Over to my left is the big grey wall in front of the church. Are we the Thoughts of God? a poster asks. No, I realise. It's the reverse.

I'm in charge of raising a young woman one day, to be a mother and hopefully a wife.