It always hurts when you lose a secret.

Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.

I developed an anger at [Moses] Mendelssohn. Later, I read the book. I realized there was nothing subversive in it.

It is up to us to determine whether the years ahead will be for humankind a curse or a blessing. We always must remember that it is given to men and women to choose life and living, not death and destruction.

A man who is fighting for the future of mankind is not waiting for torture, he's waiting for -- the Revolution.

My approach is not a scientific approach. For that, we have greater minds than mine. My approach is: I am in the possession of a text, it has survived so many centuries, and it is my task, my pleasure, to try to decipher it and find all the things that have been said about these few words by generations and generations of commentators. That is what I'm doing. I don't innovate anything. I'm just repeating.

Pain is essential. Often I cannot avoid it.Therefore all one can do is redeem it; and the only way to redeem it is through literature, art, poetry, music.