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.

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.

If there is a chronic infirmity by which every teacher ought to be afflicted, it is, indeed, hope.

To starve a child of the spell of the story, of the canter of the poem, oral or written, is a kind of living burial. It is to immure him in emptiness.

If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen man are those of the legal code.

It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.

To be a European is to try to negotiate morally, intellectually and existentially the opposing statements and praxis of the city of Socrates and the city of Isaiah.