In all my life I never met anyone so frivolous as you two, so crazy and unbusinesslike. I tell you in plain Russian your property is going to be sold and you don't seem to understand what I say.

Life is given only once, and one wants to live it boldly, with full conscious and beauty.

What a delight it is to respect people!

A writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious.

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...

One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake.

People should be beautiful in every way - in their faces, in the way they dress, in their thoughts, and in their innermost selves.