There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.
I don't have principles. I have nerves.
For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets.