The letter kills the spirit. The written text is mute in the face of responding challenge. It does not admit of inward growth and correction. Text subverts the absolutely vital role of memory.

The Jew has his anchorage not in place but in time, in his highly developed sense of history as personal context. Six thousand years of self-awareness are a homeland.

Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.

The whispers of shared ecstasy are choral.

I have students who are now in chairs in five continents. They invite me to their inaugurals. A tremendous reward.

I believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes the readers answer for themselves; that the work of art far more than an essay or a tract involves the reader, challenges him directly and brings him into the argument.

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