I admired my father very much... at the age of sixteen. But now I see that he was a brutal and cruel man, - but not without remorse, and that was what tortured us, his alternations.
To be the child of immigrants from Eastern Europe is in itself a special kind of experience; and an important one to an author. He has heard two languages through childhood, the one spoken with ease at home, and the other spoken with ease in the streets and at school, but spoken poorly at home.
All literature is an effort at the formal character of the epigram.
The Jew is at once alienated and indestructible; he is in exile from his own country and in exile even from himself, yet he survives the annihilating fury of history.
All poets' wives have rotten lives Their husbands look at them like knives.
What was the freedom to which the adult human being rose in the morning, if each act was held back or inspired by the overpowering ghost of a little child?
