The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.

When one is already on the edge of the grave, why not resist?

One should not ascribe the evil deeds of individual leaders or political regimes to an innate fault of the Russian people and their country.

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.

The most intense patriotism always flourishes in the rear.

I would rather have the United States as the world's policeman than the Soviet Union as the world's jailer.

[He] understood the people in a new way...The people is not everyone who speaks our language, nor yet the elect marked by the fiery stamp of genius. Not by birth, not by the work of one's hands, not by the wings of education is one elected into the people. But by one's inner self. Everyone forges his inner self year after year. One must try to temper, to cut, to polish one's soul so as to become a human being. And thereby become a tiny particle of one's own people.