To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate.

Bookishness, highest literacy, every technique of cultural propaganda and training not only can accompany bestiality and oppression and despotism but at certain points foster it.

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.

The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.

I'm sorry, I'm absolutely convinced that there is at the moment no realistic prospect for very much hope in human affairs.

My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives.

He who has read Kafka's Metamorphosis and can look into his mirror unflinching may technically be able to read print, but is illiterate in the only sense that matters.