George Steiner

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

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

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. ”

The age of the book is almost gone. ”

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. ”

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. ”