I wish that your journey will be to a light not only for yourself but for all of us. I wish that it will be a journey for the sake of heaven. I give you my blessing, Asher Lev.
I told her of a letter Camille Pissarro once wrote to his son about Monet’s dealers, who were insisting he exhibit only one kind of painting, the one that had become very popular with collectors. The...
Go to sleep, Asher. You’ve had a difficult day. A difficult day? I didn’t do a thing all day! For you, my husband, that is the most difficult kind of day you can have.
Can you understand what it means for something to be incomplete? my mother had once asked me. I understood, I understood.
Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.
A ram comes always as an astonishment. Do you know what a ram is, Benjamin? R-A-M. A random act of menschlichkeit.
A man must be forced to choose. It is only when you are forced to choose that you know what is important to you.
What is your dissertation, Ilana Davita? Babel and Camus: Twists of Fate and Faith. Babel’s The Red Cavalry and Camus’s The Stranger.
But I do not know how else the work can be done. To touch a person’s heart, you must see a person’s face. One cannot reach a soul through a telephone.
Art is a person's private vision expressed in aesthetic forms.
An Austrian philosopher named Jean Améry, tortured by the Gestapo because of his activity with the Belgian resistance and then deported to Auschwitz because he was a Jew, wrote that anyone who has bee...
An artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.
When a trout rising to a fly gets hooked on a line and finds himself unable to swim about freely, he begins with a fight which results in struggles and splashes and sometimes an escape. Often, of cour...
What’s next from you? Paintingwise, I mean. I don’t know. I’m between things now. Dawn between things or dusk between things? I don’t know that, either.
The fact is that gossip, rumors, mythmaking, and news stories are not appropriate vehicles for the communication of nuances of truth, those subtle tonalities that are often the truly crucial elements...
He's not asking me to make a choice. He's telling me to take a stand. I'm either with him or against him. All or nothing. I'm disgusted with the whole business. I don't want smicha if the price I have...
A man does not always remain at the same stage. He is always ascending or descending. When he reaches the top, he must concern himself with the probability that he will fall. When he reaches the botto...
We cannot build our lives around sickness, Asher. We must have faith in the Master of the Universe.
I held it close to my face and smelled the ink. I have always loved the smell of ink in a new book.
I call that ambiguity, I said. Riddles, puzzles, double meanings, lost possibilities, the dark side to the light, the light side to the darkness, different perspectives on the same things. Nothing in...