There is no true life within a false life.

The inadequacy of the purely purpose-oriented form is revealed for what it is-a monotonous, impoverished boring practicality.

Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.

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

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 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.

Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.