If I were asked to chose between execution and life in prison I would, of course, chose the latter. It's better to live somehow than not at all.

In my head there is a whole army of people asking to be let out and waiting for the word of command.

Every person lives his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy.

In Moscow you sit in a huge room at a restaurant; you know no one and no one knows you, and at the same time you don't feel a stranger. But here you know everyone and everyone knows you, and yet you are a stranger - a stranger... A stranger, and lonely...

These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.

You will not become a saint through other people's sins.

Is it our job to judge? The gendarme, policemen and bureaucrats have been especially prepared by fate for that job. Our job is towrite, and only to write.