After having exhausted all the arguments on behalf of evil, one utters the creed's dictums with nostalgia rather than with fervor.

What concerns me is that man, unable to articulate, to express himself adequately, reverts to action. Since the vocabulary of action is limited, as it were, to his body, he is bound to act violently, extending his vocabulary with a weapon where there should have been an adjective.

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.

On the whole, love comes with the speed of light; separation, with that of sound.

There's nothing as dear as the sight of ruins.

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.

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