My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person could do.

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 know what each house should have? A Duty Free space. Like at the airports. Then I might consider moving in with a woman.

Culture has little to do with how refined a man's intellect is

The past was filling the room like a tide of whispers.

Hollywood was always heartbreak town, though most of the world fancied it to be Shangri-La, King Solomon's mines, and Fort Knox rolled into one big ball of 24-karat gold.

I shall not completely die.

Nature as it is-nature with nothing selected or discarded from it-cannot become a work of art.

The first thing I'll do if elected is demand a recount.

We look in... Germany for a superstar. We began with 10,000 people, which applied. From these 10,000, 100 was selected. The jury is unbelievably competent.

Weak desires bring weak results, just as a small amount of fire brings a small amount of heat.

A man is what he is and no fancy lodgings or fine clothes will change that (Daniel Brennan)