There are three intellectual pursuits, and, so far as I am aware, only three, in which human beings have performed major feats before the age of puberty. They are music, mathematics, and chess.

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.

Bachelors know more about women than married men if they didn't they'd be married too.

All my books reflect travel adventures of some kind, and all have a soul: a spiritual or mystical underpinning.

I probably have a different mental approach to swimming than most people. I actually enjoy training.

All the things I used to like - cookies, ice cream, gumbo - I don't like anymore.

If it's a good script I'll do it. And if it's a bad script, and they pay me enough, I'll do it.

I really have to feel that I could make a difference in the movie, or I shouldn't be doing it.

Abuse is the weapon of the vulgar.

I don't think it's a secret that New York tastemakers don't love my work.

This we prescribe, though no physician; Deep malice makes too deep incision; Forget, forgive; conclude and be agreed; Our doctors say this is no month to bleed.

When I'm not near the girl I love, I love the girl I'm near.