There is something embarrassing in... the way in which, ... turning suffering into images, harsh and uncompromising though they are, ... wounds the shame we feel in the presence of the victims. For these victims are used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them.

To hate destructiveness, one must hate life as well: only death is an image of undistorted life ... organic life is an illness peculiar to our unlovely planet.

For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.

He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.

If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies.