Prayers are like those appeals of ours. Either they don't get through or they're returned with 'rejected' scrawled across 'em.

Gorbachev's administration was amazingly politically naïve, inexperienced and irresponsible towards the country. It was not governance but a thoughtless renunciation of power. The admiration of the West in return only strengthened his conviction that his approach was right. But let us be clear that it was Mikhail Gorbachev, and not Boris Yeltsin, as is now widely being claimed, who first gave freedom of speech and movement to the citizens of Russia.

The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.

It is unthinkable in the twentieth century to fail to distinguish between what constitutes an abominable atrocity that must be prosecuted and what constitutes that "past" which "ought not to be stirred up.

A fish does not campaign against fisheries-it only tries to slip through the mesh.

Justness exists, even if few people exist who feel it.

For a country to have a great writer is to have another government.