There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.

If one wants to lead a good life, A HUMAN LIFE, one must work.

A woman is fascinated not by art but by the noise made by those in the field.

I let myself go at the beginning and write with an easy mind, but by the time I get to the middle I begin to grow timid and to fear my story will be too long. . .That is why the beginning of my stories is always very promising and looks as though I were starting on a novel, and the middle is huddled and timid, and the end is...like fireworks.

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.

Everyone has the same God; only people differ.

We learn about life not from plusses alone, but from minuses as well.