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.

...in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.

When I'm not writing or reading, I'm thinking about both.

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.

Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.

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.