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

I have no faith in our hypocritical, false, hysterical, uneducated and lazy intelligentsia when they suffer and complain: their oppression comes from within. I believe in individual people. I see salvation in discrete individuals, intellectuals and peasants, strewn hither and yon throughout Russia. They have the strength, although there are few of them.

An actress without talent, forty years old, ate a partridge for dinner, and I felt sorry for the partridge, for it occurred to me that in its life it had been more talented, more sensible, and more honest than the actress.

Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be.

I agree that one can't dispense with the reins and the whip altogether, for knaves find their way even into literature, but no thinking will discover a better police for literature than the critics and the author's own conscience.

All saints have past and all sinners have a future.

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