The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.

The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.

There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language.

Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.

Even the human heart is slightly left of centre.

We are always in the place of beginning; there is no advance in infinity.

The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.

This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.

Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns.

The bible should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind where everything that comes along can settle on it.

It seems clear that the Bible belongs to an area of language in which metaphor is functional, and were we have to surrender precision for flexibility.

I could never have gone far in any science because on the path of every science the lion Mathematics lies in wait for you.

No one can do me any good by loving me I have more love than I need or could do any good with but people do me good by making me love them - which isn't easy.

Love thou the rose, yet leave it on its stem.

I don't want to make a style. Not tragedy, not comedy. Life is a mixing of all kind of things: comedy and tragedy going together.

In the name of justice there cannot be subjection and in the name of peace there cannot be impunity.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in the stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.

There are better mothers than disaster. A native land is the best of all mothers. We American Jews have a native land we love. But it is even better to have a native land who loves us.

I have a multivolume history of the world from the 19th century that begins with Noah's flood as though it's as historical a fact as the rise and fall of Rome.

Every individual who eats flesh food, whether an animal is killed expressely for him or not, is supporting the trade of slaughtering and contributing to the violent deaths of harmless animals.