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.

I'm 100 percent Jewish by blood, but by education I'm nothing. By affiliation I'm nothing.

Perhaps art is simply an organism's reaction against its retentive limitations.

The government, the state, they're just objects of jokes rather than serious consideration. I can't possibly take them seriously.

Bad literature is a form of treason.

Man is what he reads.

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