Pornographers subvert this last, vital privacy; they do our imagining for us. They take away the words that were of the night and shout them over the roof-tops, making them hollow.

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.

He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)

I never said, 'I want to be alone.' I only said, 'I want to be left alone.' There is all the difference.

I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of, you know, fat cat bankers on Wall Street.

Man is simply playing by nature's rules,and art is man's attempt to imitate the beauty of the Creator's hand

What's normal is for things to work. What's not normal is for things to fail.

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street.

It's hard to have a friend when your name's a household word.

Gifts are like fish-hooks; for who is not aware that the greedy char is deceived by the fly which he swallows?

Remember when movies were just good or bad, before auteurs, film festivals, and guys from USC who were the first to shoot underwater?

Lot of stories in deceit, how characters deceive other people, but most of all, I think, how they deceive themselves. We're not as tricky as we think we are.