In the camp, this meant committing my verse-many thousands of lines-to memory. To help me with this I improvised decimal counting beads and, in transit prisons, broke up matchsticks and used the fragments as tallies. As I approached the end of my sentences I grew more confident of my powers of memory, and began writing down and memorizing prose-dialogue at first, but then, bit by bit, whole densely written passages. My memory found room for them! It worked. But more and more of my time-in the end as much as one week every month-went into the regular repetition of all I had memorized.

Human beings are better and lazier than their rules and instructions.

During my time in the camps, I had got to know the enemies of the human race quite well: they respect the big fist and nothing else; the harder you slug them, the safer you will be.

To stand up for truth is nothing. For truth, you must sit in jail.

... some kind of clean, pure feeling does live within us, existing apart from all our convictions.

When Russia started to regain some of its strength as an economy and as a state, the West's reaction - perhaps a subconscious one, based on erstwhile fears - was panic.

Even the most broad-minded of us can embrace only that part of truth into which our own snout has blundered.