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

In America, a metrical poem is likely to conjure up the idea of the sort of poet who wears ties and lunches at the faculty club. In Russia it suggests the moral force of an art practiced against the greatest personal odds, as a discipline, solitary and intense.

If I can get somewhere, I'm all right. If not, I'm miserable.

Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets.

It's rather an exhilarating feeling. It's 6 or 7 when you get up and go out into the fields wearing your Wellingtons or high boots. You know that at this very hour half the nation does the same thing, which gives you, with the benefit of hindsight, a satisfaction in doing those things, too, a knowledge, a sense of the nation. I was a city boy until then.

What should I say about life? That it's long and abhors transparence.

Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.