Poor Dimitri Shostakovich: In the Soviet Union, he was condemned as being too radical; in the West, for being too conservative. He could please no one but the musical public. He revenged himself on both by writing a short piece called 'March of the Soviet Police.'

I do not believe in personal immortality; it seems so unnecessary. Show me one man who deserves to live forever.

Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things; for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead; symmetrical but stiff.

Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.

Baseball serves as a good model for democracy in action: Every player is equally important and each has a chance to be a hero.

The love of a man for his wife, his child, of the land where he lives and works, is for me the real meaning of mystical experience.

War: First day in the U.S. Army, the government placed a Bible in my left hand, a bayonet in the other.