Pogroms were whipped up every minute and people were murdered daily, especially Jews of course.
A writer isn’t a writer because he has a membership card but because he writes. How do you know what bright ideas may not be swarming in my head?
The only thing he said was that among human vices he considered cowardice one of the first.
What are smart people for if not to untangle tangled things?
For an addict there is one pleasure of which no one can deprive him – his ability to spend his time in absolute solitude. And solitude means deep, significant thought; it means, calm, contemplation – and wisdom.
FOLLOW ME, READER! Who told you that there is no such thing as real, true, eternal love? Cut out his lying tongue! Follow me, reader, and only me and I will show you that love!
This was at dusk, in mid-October. And she left. I lay down on the sofa and fell asleep without turning on the light. I was awakened by the feeling that the octopus was there. Groping in the dark, I barely managed to turn on the light. My pocket watch showed two o’clock in the morning. I was falling ill when I went to bed, and I woke up sick. It suddenly seemed to me that the autumn darkness would push through the glass and pour into the room, and I would drown in it as in ink.
No, make me forget you, then I’ll be free.
His only words were that he regarded cowardice as one of the worst human sins.
Think, now: where would your good be if there were no evil and what would the world look like without shadow?
How can we help Mikhail Alexandrovich? By staying hungry? But us, you know, we’re alive!
We are speaking different languages, as always, but that doesn’t change the things we talk about.
Unfortunately, I cannot do that,’ replied the master, ‘because I burned it in the stove.’ ‘Forgive me, but I don’t believe you,’ Woland replied, ’that cannot be: manuscripts don’t burn.
But The Master and Margarita is true to the broader sense of the novel as a freely developing form embodied in the works of Dostoevsky and Gogol, of Swift and Sterne, of Cervantes, Rabelais and Apuleius.
I don’t like the news on the radio. It’s always read by girls of some sort who pronounce the place names incomprehensibly. What’s more, one in three of them has a slight speech defect, as though such ones are selected deliberately.
The lodger told Anfisa, Anna Frantsevna’s long-time and devoted housekeeper, to say, in case he received any telephone calls, that he would be back in ten minutes, and left together with the proper, white-gloved policeman. He not only did not come back in ten minutes, but never came back at all.
Some totalitarians prefer to conceal themselves behind the machinery of the state, but, like the cannibal who lovingly cradles his victim as he digs around for his heart, Stalin liked conversing with his terrorized children. He was an intimate murderer.
She had a look of suffering and I was struck less by her beauty than by the extraordinary loneliness in her eyes.
It happens that way when a man strives to become the centre of attention, to bring sensational news somewhere.
The poet had wasted his night while others had spent it enjoying themselves and now he realised that it was lost forever. He only had to lift his head up from the lamp and look at the sky to see that the night had gone beyond return. Waiters were hurriedly jerking the cloths off the tables. The cats pacing the verandah had a morning look about them. Day broke inexorably over the poet.