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

An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.

Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell. (in conversation, explaining his dislike for Tolstoy)

In Russia, the moment a person opens his mouth you know where he's from. There's the uniformity of experience of an individual in Russia. When you're about 7 years old you get into school and you get put in this factory or this bureaucracy or whatever. The options are computable. Here it's tremendously diverse.

It's rather an exhilarating feeling. It's 6 or 7 when you get up and go out into the fields wearing your Wellingtons or high boots. You know that at this very hour half the nation does the same thing, which gives you, with the benefit of hindsight, a satisfaction in doing those things, too, a knowledge, a sense of the nation. I was a city boy until then.

I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet. I believe that I will return. Poets always return in flesh or on paper.

For darkness restores what light cannot repair.