Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances - from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime.

Our Twentieth Century has proved to be more cruel than preceding centuries, and the first fifty years have not erased all its horrors. Our world is rent asunder by those same old cave-age emotions of greed, envy, lack of control, mutual hostility which have picked up in passing respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, radical conflict, struggle of the masses, trade-union disputes.

Generosity is a two-edged virtue for an artist - it nourishes his imagination but has a fatal effect on his routine.

I dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it. And may they please forgive me for not having seen it all nor remembered it all, for not having divined all of it - from The Gulag Archipelago

If you live in a graveyard, you can't weep for everyone.

One word of truth outweighs the whole world.