I have been writing in spurts, bit by bit. It is incredibly difficult. Everything is corroded, broken, dismantled; everything is covered with hardened layers of accumulated insensitivity, deafness, entrenched routine. It is disgusting.

Mother Russia is on the move, she can't stand still, she's restless and can't find rest, she's talking and she can't stop.

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

... the unarmed power of naked truth.

And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness.

Art always serves beauty, and beauty is the joy of possessing form, and form is the key to organic life since no living thing can exist without it.

He was a natural, and in the Russian way, tragically above these banalities.