Here I am with you & yet not for a single moment do I forget that there's an unfinished novel waiting for me.

A good upbringing means not that you won't spill sauce on the tablecloth, but that you won't notice it when someone else does.

Even in Siberia there is happiness.

If you wish women to love you be original; I know a man who used to wear felt boots summer and winter & women fell in love with him.

There will come a time when everybody will know why, for what purpose, there is all this suffering, and there will be no more mysteries. But now we must live ... we must work, just work!

I don’t understand anything about the ballet; all I know is that during the intervals the ballerinas stink like horses.

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.