My poems getting published in Russia doesn't make me feel in any fashion, to tell you the truth. I'm not trying to be coy, but it doesn't tickle my ego.

As to the state, from my point of view, the measure of a writer's patriotism is not oaths from a high platform, but how he writes in the language of the people among whom he lives .

How delightful to find a friend in everyone.

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.

As long as the state permits itself to interfere in the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere with the affairs of state.

I don't want to dive into that mud slide, which is what I consider the literary process.

Bad literature is a form of treason.