I'm a bad Jew, a bad Russian, a bad everything.

I don't believe in that country any longer. I'm not interested. I'm writing in the language, and I like the language.

This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.

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

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

Every life has a file, if you will.

I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement, that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that he tries to make some sort of change - within himself, not on the outside.