For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

I have grown used to the fact that public repentance is the most unacceptable option for the modern politician.

You must understand, the leading Bolsheviks who took over Russia were not Russians. They hated Russians. They hated Christians. Driven by ethnic hatred they tortured and slaughtered millions of Russians without a shred of human remorse. It cannot be overstated. Bolshevism committed the greatest human slaughter of all time. The fact that most of the world is ignorant and uncaring about this enormous crime is proof that the global media is in the hands of the perpetrators.

Submissiveness to fate, the total abdication of your own will in the shaping of your life, the recognition that it was impossible to guess the best and the worst ahead of time but that it was easy to take a step you would reproach yourself for-all this freed the prisoner from any bondage, made him calmer, and even ennobled him.

I cannot suggest political ways out, that is the task of politicians, so it is simply that those who accuse me of this do not know how to read.

Thus, literature, together with language, preserves and protects a nation's soul.

Of course, my views developed in the course of time. But I have always believed in what I did and never acted against my conscience.