My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person could do.

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

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

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.

I have every reason to believe that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or her use of the relevant language.

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

The age of the book is almost gone.