Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.

The aims of life are the best defense against death.

Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.

There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.

Each of us bears the imprint of a friend met along the way; In each the trace of each.

I am constantly amazed by man's inhumanity to man.

Everybody is somebody's Jew.

A country is considered the more civilised the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak and a powerful one too powerful.

Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.

Dawn came on us like a betrayer; it seemed as though the new sun rose as an ally of our enemies to assist in our destruction.

Man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust.

Success is evident from the joy you experience. Be willing to let go of anything that takes your joy away.

Don't reach for the halo too soon. You have plenty of time to enjoy yourself, even a little maliciously sometimes, before you settle down to being a saint.

Well, the wonderful thing about making movies, oddly enough, is that they're sort of highly motivated graduate studies in one or another field.

I have to keep up with the scientific literature as part of my job, but increasingly I found myself reading things that weren't really relevant to my academic work, but were relevant to gardening.

At one hundred, surely you learn to overcome loss and grief—or do they hound you till the bitter end?

...when people already know they're deficient, they have nothing to lose by trying.

George W. Bush even stopped in Pennsylvania to try his hand at the lotto and gave up when he could only think of the numbers 4 and 17

pragmatist that I am, I always meet necessity with enthusiasm.

Salvation is an individual relationship with God. I've always considered myself to be a devotional poet, and I consider myself to be a devotional novelist.

Art consists of reshaping life but it does not create life, nor cause life.