I had been told that if you asked him a question, it would take him three hours to answer, and I could see now what people meant, but he was neither a bore nor garrulous. On the contrary, I have rarely known a scholar who expressed himself — with all his material at his fingertips — so brilliantly and so much to the point. He would give me, to each of my questions, a full and closely reasoned answer, and stop when he had covered the ground (Wilson about Flusser).

In 1969 Edmund Wilson (who by then had already written 22 books), penned an eloquent portrait of David Flusser when he recounted his conversations with Flusser in his The Dead Sea Scrolls 1947-1969 (London: W. H. Allen, 1969):

I had met him [David Flusser] in the library of the University and asked him to come to see me, and he arrived at the King David Hotel, precipitately, abruptly, hatless, with his briefcase in his hand, and the moment we sat down in the lobby, quite without a conventional opening — since he knew that I was looking for light on the subject — he began to talk about the scrolls. He was dynamic, imaginative, passionately interested. I had heard about his absorption in ancient texts — which he seems always to carry about him — while waiting in queues for his marketing. The important thing, he said at once, was not the polemics about the dates, but what was implied by the contents of the manuscripts. He started in English but asked if he could speak French. His English was bad, he said; and f

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