Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family. Even your super weirdo creep cousin.

When Thomas Mann arrived in California from Germany, they asked him about German literature. And he said, 'German literature is where I am.' It's really a bit grand, but if a German can afford it, I can afford it.

Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the holy book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose.

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet.

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.

If they had wanted to punish me, they should have kept me in a communal apartment. Then I would have become a wreck.

Russian talk of political evil is as natural as eating.