Literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof. Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade.

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.

If you have ever wanted to serve god, go on and serve him. Don't wait to be authorized by anybody. He is not copyrighted

Comedians are the one who have to tell the emperor he has no clothes on.

I've always managed by walking around. Any CEO or leader who spends the majority of his time in his office is not doing his job.

A novelist is a man who doesn't like his mother.

I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.

If there would come a voice from God saying, 'I'm against vegetarianism!' I would say, 'Well, I am for it!' This is how strongly I feel in this regard.

I applaud the courage of he who accepts each and every one of the laws of a game he did not invent and was not asked if he wanted to play

A lot of what's been written about me is not true: of my family history or my choices or my interests. Actually, I've never read anything written about me that was true. It's been completely crazy.

Advance our standards, set upon our foes; Our ancient word of courage, fair Saint George, Inspire us with the spleen of fiery dragons!