We shall kill. If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day... Do not count days; do not count miles. Count only the number of Germans you have killed.

It’s as much a writer’s concern, who is responsible to his readers for all the books written before him as well as those which will be written after him.

We shall kill. If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day... Do not count days; do not count miles. Count only the number of Germans you have killed.

It seems to me that the novel is very much alive as a form. Without any question, every epoch has its own forms, and the novel nowadays cannot resemble that of the nineteenth century. In this domain all experiments are justified, and it is better to write something new clumsily than to repeat the old brilliantly. In the nineteenth century, novels dealt with the fate of a person or of a family; this was linked to life in that period. In our time the destinies of people are interwoven. Whether man recognizes it or not, his fate is much more linked to that of many other people than it used to be.

There is nothing more wonderful than freedom of speech.

Unfortunately, young Russian artists are in a difficult position today. Painting, like all other arts, rests on a continuity of experience. More than anything, young painters and sculptors need to know the works of their immediate elders. Such a continuity does not exist here to a sufficient degree in the visual arts.

We know that art is connected with the land, with its salt, with its smell, that outside of national culture there is no art. Cosmopolitanism - a world in which things lose their color and form, and words lose their significance. We love in our past all that we consider native, wonderful and fair.