Look, if I were alone in the world, I would have the right to choose despair, solitude and self-fulfillment. But I am not alone.

What is being lost is the magic of the word. I am not an image person. Imagery belongs to another civilization: the caveman. Caveman couldn't express himself so he put images on walls.

We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else.

Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking and loving and dreaming. At night everything is more intense, more true. The echo of words that have been spoken during the day takes on a new and deeper meaning. The tragedy of man is that he doesn't know how to distinguish between day and night. He says things at night that should only be said by day.

Not all games are innocent. Some come dangerously close to cruelty.

[Moses] Mendelssohn was a religious Jew. I felt sorry for him.

My ambition really was, even as a child, to be a writer, a commentator, and a teacher, but a teacher of Talmud.