After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.

In the West you have every opportunity for civilization to triumph.

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.

After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.

If there is anything good about exile, it is that it teaches one humility. It accelerates one’s drift into isolation, an absolute perspective. Into the condition at which all one is left with is oneself and one’s language, with nobody or nothing in between. Exile brings you overnight where it would normally take a lifetime to go.

As to the state, from my point of view, the measure of a writer's patriotism is not oaths from a high platform, but how he writes in the language of the people among whom he lives .

I'm a bad Jew, a bad Russian, a bad everything.