I won't talk to you about my family and you won't talk to me about yours. Family talk is either boring or self-pitying. Or it's Gothic, like a Faulkner novel. Who needs to talk about it? It's enough to live it.

It is inconceivable to me that a million or three million or half a million human beings will think and feel precisely the same way on any single subject.

I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.

There is in my work a very strong religious foreground and background. In the later work some of that tends to diminish, but it's certainly present in the early work.

Each generation thinks it fights new battles. But the battles are the same. Only the people are different.

We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much, if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?...I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing; but the eye that blinks, that is something.

Come, let us have some tea and continue to talk about happy things.