The Jewish people have been in exile for 2,000 years; they have lived in hundreds of countries, spoken hundreds of languages and still they kept their old language, Hebrew. They kept their Aramaic, later their Yiddish; they kept their books; they kept their faith.
We write not only for children but also for their parents. They, too, are serious children.
They still believe in God, the family, angels, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other obsolete stuff.
When we’re trying to decide whether a leader is a good leader or a bad one, the question to ask is: ‘Is he with the Ten Commandments or is he against them?’ Then you can determine if the leader is a true messiah or another Stalin.
A Marxist has never written a good novel.
God is a writer and we are both the heroes and the readers.
Slaughter and justice cannot dwell together.
In many ways, astrology, numerology and palmistry are corruptions of the occult because they have attempted to make a practice out of something that is essentially imaginative.
From borrowing one gets poorer and from work one gets richer.
Those who run around with women don’t walk tightropes. They find it hard enough to crawl on the ground.
When a human being kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice.
Heaven and earth conspire that everything which has been, be rooted and reduced to dust. Only the dreamers, who dream while awake, call back the shadows of the past and braid nets from the unspun thread.
It seems that the analysis of character is the highest human entertainment. And literature does it, unlike gossip, without mentioning names.
No matter how much you know a human being, you don’t know him enough.
I am not ashamed to admit that I belong to those who fantasize that literature is capable of bringing new horizons and new perspectives – philosophical, religious, aesthetical and even social.
The pessimism of the creative person is not decadence but a mighty passion for the redemption of man.
Literature is the memory of humanity.
I know as a writer how valuable a tool is the wastebasket. Perhaps God throws away many experiments before He finds the right expression. Perhaps we are the discards – or we could be the part He keeps. This mystery is what keeps us all going, to see what happens in the next chapter.
Actually, the true story of a person’s life can never be written. It is beyond the power of literature. The full tale of any life would be both utterly boring and utterly unbelievable.
As much as I can give of myself I give of myself. There’s no reason why not. And when I have to hide something, I let the character speak.