"We do not rejoice in victories. We rejoice when a new kind of cotton is grown and when strawberries bloom in Israel."

"The Soviet government is the most realistic regime in the world - no ideals."

"One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present."

"Above all, this country is our own. Nobody has to get up in the morning and worry what his neighbors think of him. Being a Jew is no problem here."

"You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does."

"Almost all institutions own a lot more art than they can ever show, much of it revealing for its timeliness, genius, or sheer weirdness."

"Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples."

"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival."