In every generation there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it.

And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?

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.

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

The great majority of us are required to live a constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected by it if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what bring brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn’t just a fiction, it’s part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like teeth in our mouth. It can’t be forever violated with impunity.

I used to be very revolutionary, but now I think that nothing can be gained by brute force. People must be drawn to good by goodness.

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