I am of Russian-Jewish distraction.

I always cause those who are near to me more suffering than pleasure.

The Jew is at once alienated and indestructible; he is in exile from his own country and in exile even from himself, yet he survives the annihilating fury of history.

Major writing is to say that which has been seen, so that it need never be said again; so that which has been seen increases, changes in reality, in being.

What does long life avail? The best seats at the funerals of friends.

I admired my father very much... at the age of sixteen. But now I see that he was a brutal and cruel man, - but not without remorse, and that was what tortured us, his alternations.

I got married the second time in the way that, when a murder is committed, crackpots turn up at the police station to confess the crime.