To many writers and thinkers, though not to all, another text is, or can be, the most naked and charged of life-forces ... The concept of allusion or analogue is totally inadequate. To Dante these other texts are the organic context of identity. They are as directly about life as life is about them.

Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely.

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.

The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.

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

We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.

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