Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
If a novel's salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.
When something does not insist on being noticed when we aren't grabbed by the collar or struck on the skull by a presence or an event we take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratit...
What we remember from childhood we remember forever-permanent ghosts stamped imprinted eternally seen.
The engineering is secondary to the vision.
After a certain number of years our faces become our biographies.
Profound subject matter can be encompassed in small space - for proof, look at any sonnet by Shakespeare!
Dedication to one's work in the world is the only possible sanctifica-tion. Religion in all its forms is dedication to Someone Else's work not yours.
Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the mud, uncles' and cousins' books, tablets and capsules and powders...
In books, as in life, there are no second chances. On second thought: it's the next work, still to be written, that offers the second chance.
An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion, one need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay rarely has an educatio...
To say that such-and-such a circumstance is 'Kafkaesque' is to admit to the denigration of an imagination that has burned a hole in what we take to be modernism - even in what we take to be the ordina...
I don't agree with the sentiment 'write what you know.'... I think one should write what one doesn't know. The world is bigger and wider and more complex than our small subjective selves. One should p...
Hebrew as a contemporary language, especially for poetry, is no longer the language of the Bible; but neither is it not the language of the Bible.
In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psych...