Perhaps the best proof of the Almighty's existence is that we never know when we are to die.

I was quite happy in Arkhangelsk.Subsequently, I was sent to a village. I liked it in its own way because it sounded to me very much like the tradition of a hired man in any world-class poem. That's what I was, a hired man. I was working for a collective farm.

I don't want to dive into that mud slide, which is what I consider the literary process.

No matter under what circumstances you leave it, home does not cease to be home. No matter how you lived there - well or poorly.

When I'm not writing or reading, I'm thinking about both.

I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet. I believe that I will return. Poets always return in flesh or on paper.

Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe ... that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens.