“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...and then one day you find yourself leaning here, writing on that round glass table salvaged from the Park View Pharmacy--writing this, an impossibility, a summary of who you came to be where you are now, and where, God knows, is that?”

“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, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.”

“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.”

“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 prod, goad the imagination.”

“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 ordinary fabric and intent of language. Nothing is like 'The Hunger Artist.' Nothing is like 'The Metamorphosis.'”

“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 educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play.”

“Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by. ”

“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.”

“Profound subject matter can be encompassed in small space - for proof, look at any sonnet by Shakespeare!”

“Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.”

“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.”