To dine, drink champagne, raise a racket and make speeches about the people's consciousness, the people's conscience, freedom andso forth while servants in tails are scurrying around your table, just like serfs, and out in the severe cold on the street await coachmen--this is the same as lying to the holy spirit.

Those who come a hundred or two hundred years after us will despise us for having lived our lives so stupidly and tastelessly. Perhaps they'll find a means to be happy.

Anna Petrovna: Never talk to women about your own good qualities. Let them find out for themselves.

I don't like being successful; the subjects which sit in my head are annoyed and jealous of what has already been written.

Not one of our mortal gauges is suitable for evaluating non-existence, for making judgments about that which is not a person.

But if you had asked him what his work was, he would look candidly and openly at you with his large bright eyes through his gold pincenez, and would answer in a soft, velvety, lisping baritone: "My work is literature."

It is always "Youth, youth," when there is nothing else to be said.