A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it.

Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.

Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.

Those who cannot help ought also not advise: in an order where every mousehole has been plugged, mere advice exactly equals condemnation.

Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.

There's not much need for prophets who are in synch with their society.

Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.