Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere.

What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.

I find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language.

We live, understandably enough, with the sense of urgency; our clock, like Baudelaire's, has had the hands removed and bears the legend, "It is later than you think." But with us it is always a little too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for naïve moralizing. We seem to like to condemn our finest but not our worst qualities by pitting them against the exigency of time.

If one defends the bourgeois, philistine virtues, one does not defend them merely from the demonism or bohemianism of the artist but from the present bourgeoisie itself.

Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.

We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.