For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.

All classifications in this world lack sharp boundaries, and all transitions are gradual.

A work of art contains its verification in itself: artificial, strained concepts do not withstand the test of being turned into images; they fall to pieces, turn out to be sickly and pale, convince no one. Works which draw on truth and present it to us in live and concentrated form grip us, compellingly involve us, and no one ever, not even ages hence, will come forth to refute them.

The price of cowardice will only be evil. We shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices.

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. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer's pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.

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.

If state, party and social policy will not be based on morality, then mankind has no future to speak of.