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" The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital. "

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" My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives. "

George Steiner

Hand

Twice

Own

" My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person could do. "

" Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence. "

" I find so much writing colourless, small in its means, unwilling to take stylistic risks. Often it goes wrong; I am not the one to judge. Sometimes, I hope, it goes right. "

" We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning. "

" I have every reason to believe that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or her use of the relevant language. "

" The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion. "

" The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light. "

" Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent. "

" Given my age, I am pretty near the end, probably, of my career as a writer, a scholar, a teacher. And I wanted to speak of things I will not be able to do. "

" I'm sorry, I'm absolutely convinced that there is at the moment no realistic prospect for very much hope in human affairs. "

" I believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes the readers answer for themselves; that the work of art far more than an essay or a tract involves the reader, challenges him directly and brings him into the argument. "

" Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely. The notion that it is the occasion for our cleverness fills me with baffled bitterness and anger. "

George Steiner

Anger

Bitterness

" The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform. "

" There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness. "

" It took 10 months for me to learn to tie a lace; I must have howled with rage and frustration. But one day I could tie my laces. That no one can take from you. I profoundly distrust the pedagogy of ease. "

" I learned early on that 'rabbi' means teacher, not priest. "

" Every one of my opponents, every one of my critics, will tell you that I am a generalist spread far too thin in an age when this is not done anymore, when responsible knowledge is specialized knowledge. "

" Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life. "

" The age of the book is almost gone. "

" Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence. "

" I have students who are now in chairs in five continents. They invite me to their inaugurals. A tremendous reward. "

" To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war. "