The government, the state, they're just objects of jokes rather than serious consideration. I can't possibly take them seriously.

No matter under what circumstances you leave it, home does not cease to be home. No matter how you lived there - well or poorly.

I'm neither Catholic not Protestant. Protestant sounds good but I don't think I am.

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion.

I had this fantasy of becoming a neurosurgeon. You know, the normal Jewish boy fantasy, but I wanted to be a neurosurgeon for some reason. So I started in this unpleasant way. I was an assistant to the coroner, opening up corpses, taking the innards out, opening skulls, taking the brains out.

For darkness restores what light cannot repair.

If they had wanted to punish me, they should have kept me in a communal apartment. Then I would have become a wreck.