The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.

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.

Length of a straight line is determined by the two tiny dots on both ends

Taking a shaky breath, I spoke. “Well, recently, I learned how much my words affect people, even if it’s just one word.

In the time we have it is surely our duty to do all the good we can to all the people we can in all the ways we can.

Failing isn't bad when you learn what not to do.

Changing how we see images is clearly one way to change the world.

Sporadic thoughts will pop into my head and I'll have to go write something down, and the next thing you know, I've written a whole song in an hour.

I was working with David Warner and John Rhys-Davies, who is from the Indiana Jones movies.He's a very strong, strong presence, and so I had to assert myself.

Every last word is contagious.

Democrats are dumb and Republicans are stupid, but the difference between dumb and stupid is dumb isn't funny. Dumb is when you say something and the whole room goes, 'What did he say?'

You cannot achieve someone else's goals.