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.

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

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.

Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.

So easy to go sailing off this road. A wonder more folks didn't. All that space, waiting.

Suspense is very important. Even though this is humor and they're short stories, that theory of building suspense is still there.

I'm one of those firm believers that good music will prevail.

As long as man remains an inquiring animal, there can never be a complete unanimity in our fundamental beliefs. The more diverse our paths, the greater is likely to be the divergence of beliefs.

Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living. My dad said, Booty - mmm mmm.

I've struck up a tremendous intimacy with Conte Alberto, and we literally can't live without each other. He is the first object my eyes greet in the morning, and the last at night.

It is the height of professionalism to be able to make an ordinary piece of music sound good. When playing routine melodic studies the player must treat them as if they are musical value.

I hate the word 'cheap'. People are cheap. Clothing is either expensive or inexpensive.

May I never loose the Wonder, Oh the Wonder of Your Mercy! May I sing Your Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Amen!

...paranormal phenomena such as apports, prediction, telepathy, dowsing and the like can be explained by an extended physics as potentially real effects.