Nothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once did. I don't know? you get so old and you sort of give up in some way. You've had your period of angst, your period of religious desperation, and you've arrived at a philosophical position where you don't need, or you can't bear, to look at it.

Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.

The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.

The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.