I'm not trying to be ridiculous or funny, but it was rather pleasant to find yourself in isolation, in solitary.

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

I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is.

As failures go, attempting to recall the past is like trying to grasp the meaning of existence. Both make one feel like a baby clutching at a basketball: one's palms keep sliding off.

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.

Every life has a file, if you will.

Language and, presumably, literature are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature toward the state is essentially the reaction of the permanent-better yet, the infinite-against the temporary, against the finite.