Time narrows or expands according to how we approach it. It varies with a man’s breadth, with his heart.

There is no progress in art.

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.

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.

People seldom learn from the mistakes of others-not because they deny the value of the past, but because they are faced with new problems.

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.

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.