Still, everybody wants to eat.

The solemn pledge to abstain from telling the truth was called socialist realism.

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

The one good thing about repeating your mistakes is that you know when to cringe

When I returned to Russia in 1994, the Western world and its states were practically being worshipped. Admittedly, this was caused not so much by real knowledge or a conscious choice, but by the natural disgust with the Bolshevik regime and its anti-Western propaganda.

At what point, then, should one resist? When one's belt is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner? When one crosses the threshold of one's home? An arrest consists of a series of incidental irrelevancies, of a multitude of things that do not matter, and there seems no point in arguing about one of them individually...and yet all these incidental irrelevancies taken together implacably constitute the arrest.

Truth must be told-and things must change! If words are not about real things and do not cause things to happen, what is the good of them?