Asher Lev, an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.
Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.
Art is a person's private vision expressed in aesthetic forms.
A word is worth one coin, silence is worth two
A ram comes always as an astonishment. Do you know what a ram is, Benjamin? R-A-M. A random act of menschlichkeit.
A person has to have a reason for living, and the best reason is another person. Together they can make a plan for their lives.
A man must be forced to choose. It is only when you are forced to choose that you know what is important to you.
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.
What is your dissertation, Ilana Davita? Babel and Camus: Twists of Fate and Faith. Babel’s The Red Cavalry and Camus’s The Stranger.
If there were not anxiety behind those apples, Cézanne would not interest me any more than Bouguereau.
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...
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.
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...
We cannot build our lives around sickness, Asher. We must have faith in the Master of the Universe.
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...
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...
A blink of an eye in itself is nothing.But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning,...
It's always easier to learn something than to use what you've learned. . . . You're alone when you're learning. But you always use it on other people. It's different when there are other people involv...