There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

The moment that you place blame somewhere, you undermine your resolve to change anything.

Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.

Creativity is an unending exercise in uncertainty.

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

At certain periods of history it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with reality by condensing it into something graspable, something that otherwise wouldn't be retained by the mind.

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