We shall find peace. We shall hear angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.
It is the writer’s business not to accuse and not to prosecute, but to champion the guilty, once they are condemned and suffer punishment.
I kept thinking how marvellous it would be if I could somehow tear my heart, which felt so heavy, out of my chest.
Write, write, write-till your fingers break.
Three o’clock in the morning. The soft April night is looking at my windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I can’t sleep, I am so happy.
You ask me what life is. That’s like asking what a carrot is. A carrot is a carrot, and there’s nothing more to know.
We go to great pains to alter life for the happiness of our descendants and our descendants will say as usual: things used to be so much better, life today is worse than it used to be.
The government is not God. It does not have the right to take away that which it can’t return even if it wants to.
Brevity – the sister of talent.
Despite your best efforts, you could not invent a better police force for literature than criticism and the author’s own conscience.
A writer is not a confectioner, a cosmetic dealer, or an entertainer.
Those who come a hundred or two hundred years after us will despise us for having lived our lives so stupidly and tastelessly. Perhaps they’ll find a means to be happy.
Money, like vodka, turns a person into an eccentric.
It is not only the prisoners who grow coarse and hardened from corporal punishment, but those as well who perpetrate the act or are present to witness it.
Dear and most respected bookcase! I welcome your existence, which has for over one hundred years been devoted to the radiant ideals of goodness and justice.
There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.
All of life and human relations have become so incomprehensibly complex that, when you think about it, it becomes terrifying and your heart stands still.
Man is what he believes.
Watching a woman make Russian pancakes, you might think that she was calling on the spirits or extracting from the batter the philosopher’s stone.
I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious.