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...

How should a Jew feel? There we went through the seven gates of hell for matzos. Here I stand in matzos over my head. So how should a Jew feel? You are an angel of...

For all the pain you suffered, my mama. For all the torment of your past and future years, my mama. For all the anguish this picture of pain will cause you. For the unspeakable mystery...

It’s not a pretty world, Papa.”I’ve noticed,’ my father said softly.

Something that is yours forever is never precious

I like his optimism,’ I said. ‘I like the way when he and some other rabbis saw a jackal in the ruins of Jerusalem, and the others began to cry, he laughed and said that...

… an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.

…everything has a past. Everything – a person, an object, a word, everything. If you don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present and plan properly for the future.

Truth has to be given in riddles. People can’t take truth if it comes charging at them like a bull. The bull is always killed. You have to give people the truth in a riddle,...

I walked the streets and tasted the golden sun that lay across the city.

Art is a person’s private vision expressed in aesthetic forms.

It was no joy waking up after a dream about that man. He left a taste of thunder in my mouth.

I will go wherever the truth leads me. It is secular scholarship, Rebbe; it is not the scholarship of tradition. In secular scholarship there are no boundaries and no permanently fixed views.”Lurie, if the Torah...

The everyday was king. And the courtiers were popularization, superficiality, doubt, cynicism. The century was exhausted.

Millions of people can draw. Art is whether there is a scream in you wanting to get out in a special way.

I went away and cried to the Master of the Universe, “What have you done to me? A mind like this I need for a son? A heart I need for a son, a soul...

…a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something.

Have thine own way, Lord! Have thine own way!Thou art the Potter and I am the clay.

An artist has got to get acquainted with himself just as much as he can. It is no easy job, for it is not a present-day habit of humanity.

I’ve begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.

He looked down at the books. There was a long silence. Then he raised his eyes and directed his gaze at Gershon, and Gershon did not look away. “I will tell you, Loran what is...

> Why does everything that lives have to die?< So life would be precious, Asher. Something that is yours forever, is never precious.

An artist is a person first.

A word is worth one coin, silence is worth two

Reuven listen to me. The Talmud says that a person should do two things for himself. One is to acquire a teacher. Do you remember the other.””Choose a friend,” I said.”Yes. You know what a...

In our time… a man whose enemies are faceless bureaucrats almost never wins. It is our equivalent to the anger of the gods in ancient times. But those gods you must understand were far more...

Every artist is a man who has freed himself from his family, his nation, his race. Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a...

The silence became unreal and seemed suddenly filled with a noise of its own, the noise of a too long silence.

And then I was crying too, crying with Danny, silently, for his pain and for the years of his suffering, knowing that I loved him, and not knowing whether I hated or loved the long,...

You can listen to silence, Reuven. I’ve begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes....

It is strange how ideas can float about and be ignored until they are put into a book. A book can be a weapon…

Art begins . . . when someone interprets, when someone sees the world through his own eyes. Art happens when what is seen becomes mixed with the inside of the person who is seeing it.

Two people who are true friends are like two bodies with one soul

In Russia I went to a great yeshiva, and in America I work in a carnival.

Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.

Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there...

Perhaps. But it is childish to think of what might have been.

I do not have many things that are meaningful to me. Except my doubts and my fears. And my art.