As A Species We Are Always Hungry

Literature Presents You With Alternate Mappings Of The Human Experience. You See That The Experiences Of Other People And Other Cultures Are As Rich, Coherent, And Troubled As Your Own Experiences. They Are As Beset With Suffering As Yours. Literature Is A Kind Of Legitimate Voyeurism Through The Keyhole Of Language Where You Really Come To Know Other People's Lives--their Anguish, Their Loves, Their Passions. Often You Discover That Once You Dive Into Those Lives And Get Below The Surface, The Veneer, There Is A Real Closeness.

Art Is A Person's Private Vision Expressed In Aesthetic Forms.

I Think Most Serious Writers, Certainly In The Modern Period, Use Their Own Lives Or The Lives Of People Close To Them Or Lives They Have Heard About As The Raw Material For Their Creativity.

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 Cannot Go Out Into Your World Of Scholarship And Return Stronger, Then We Are All Fools And Charlatans. I Have Faith In The Torah. I Am Not Afraid Of Truth.

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.