The letter kills the spirit. The written text is mute in the face of responding challenge. It does not admit of inward growth and correction. Text subverts the absolutely vital role of memory.

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.

Where's the guy who gave me Twinkies and Coke?

I want people to understand there is a such a thing as creating a harmonious experience between the dogs and the humans.

There is no middle ground in Hollywood; you're a failure or you're a success. That mentality is wild.

I would like to explore comedy more. It's not something that I've done a lot of. Obviously, I'm very at home in drama. I like everything.

Physic, for the most part, is nothing else but the substitute of exercise and temperance.

We will fight in every valley, in every street, in every oasis, and every town. We won't surrender again; we are not women; we will keep fighting.

When I was very young I was the ugly duckling. I had a lot of complexes. My sister was wonderful and I was nothing.

The victories of character are instant, and victories for all.

All unnecessary vows are folly, because they suppose a prescience of the future, which has not been given us.

In 13 years I've come to the conclusion that I need to play for second or third place.