An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.
The Constitution doesn’t mention rain.
I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is.
Perhaps art is simply an organism’s reaction against its retentive limitations.
There’s nothing as dear as the sight of ruins.
Love itself is the most elitist of passions. It acquires its stereoscopic substance and perspective only in the context of culture, for it takes up more place in the mind than it does in bed. Outside of that setting it falls flat into one-dimensional fiction.
Racism? But isn’t it only a form of misanthropy?
A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
In the end, like the Almighty Himself, we make everything in our image, for want of a more reliable model; our artifacts tell more about ourselves than our confessions.
What should I say about life? That it’s long and abhors transparence.
I grew up in the sort of cultural milieu that always regarded conversations about the political discourse as tremendously low-brow.
A man should know about himself two or three things: whether he is a coward; whether he is an honest man or given to lies; whether he is an ambitious man. One should define oneself first of all in those terms, and only then in terms of culture, race, creed.
If they had wanted to punish me, they should have kept me in a communal apartment. Then I would have become a wreck.
I’m 100 percent Jewish by blood, but by education I’m nothing. By affiliation I’m nothing.
I’m neither Catholic not Protestant. Protestant sounds good but I don’t think I am.
The real history of consciousness starts with one’s first lie.
At certain periods of history it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with reality by condensing it into something graspable, something that otherwise wouldn’t be retained by the mind.
As failures go, attempting to recall the past is like trying to grasp the meaning of existence. Both make one feel like a baby clutching at a basketball: one’s palms keep sliding off.
Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.
Persecution mania is still around. In your writing, in your exchanges with people, meeting people who are in Russian affairs, Russian literature, etcetera.