The whispers of shared ecstasy are choral.

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.

Sam gave Captain Suicide a droll stare. "How did you die again? Oh wait, I know this. 'I can take 'em. I don't need to wait for reinforcements. I can do it myself.' How'd that work out for you again?

With no reason to hide these words I feel, and no reason to talk about the books I read, but still, I do.

I existed in a cocoon, wrapped in daydreams. It's dangerous to be too much alone with an imagination.

Money is good for bribing yourself through the inconveniences of life.

On stage, you're not limited at all because you're free in language: language is the source of the imagination. You can travel farther in language than you can in any film.

I think we all strive to push ourselves, to overcome our struggles. And when we do, we get to know ourselves better.

We're so so interested in protecting criminals and people that want to do us harm and I think we have to go back to a little more old fashioned method of thinking, if that makes sense.

It's dangerous when music gets cornered by anything.

Going into therapy doesn't guarantee poop on toast.

I have a three-piece suit. I’m an art collector. I have a funny accent. So I’m probably the killer.