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.

I am of Russian-Jewish distraction.

Poetry must be as new as foam & old as rock.

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.

Order and disorder, form and formless must have profound psychological roots, nervous roots.

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.

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.