It's partly the fault of the institutions of education. But it's partly the decision to be relieved of responsibility. Literature is simply the most focused form of the demands on the evolution of the species. It imposes a certain responsibility, moral, ethical and esthetic responsibility, and the species simply doesn't want to oblige.

I'm 100 percent Jewish by blood, but by education I'm nothing. By affiliation I'm nothing.

I got caught up in the proletariat the way Marx describes it.

This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.

As long as the state permits itself to interfere in the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere with the affairs of state.

Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.

The eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention.