“Can art be completely invented? It’s a matter of shaping reality with the help of imagination.”

The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation.

A person has to be by himself a little bit. We weren’t born in a flock. Togetherness drives me out of my mind.

I had a feeling that my generation-and me, also-we were naked. We did not belong to anything.

My nights are a nightmare, quite often, but the nightmares are rich. I nourish myself by those nights.

The Holocaust is a central event in many people’s lives, but it also has become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it. Besides, in Israel, everyone carries a biography deep inside him.

A story is not only meaning, it’s music as well.

A believer is someone who senses a consciousness or a direction and believes in it. The one who searches for meaning has not found the direction yet.

I see myself as a man who is searching for meaning in life. This is rather different from being a staunch believer in something.

I am not writing in metaphors. I am writing about catastrophes.

People who lose their parents when young are permanently in love with them.

A formula can be very simple, and create a universe of bottomless complexity.

Judaism to me, as badly as I practiced it, what I’ve always loved about it was its total embrace of complexity, its admission of unknowability.

Is there anything in the universe more beautiful and protective than the simple complexity of a spider’s web?

The most powerful words in English are ‘Tell me a story,’ words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.

It doesn’t matter how much you want. What really matters is how much you want it. The extent and complexity of the problem does not matter was much as does the willingness to solve it.

There is a simple rule here, a rule of legislation, a rule of business, a rule of life: beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud. You can apply that rule to left-wing social programs, but you can also apply that rule to credit derivatives, hedge funds, all the rest of it.

Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.