All right - I'll tell you what you did for me: you went for happy, silly, beautiful walks with me.

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time.

Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten.

I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did.

For a Russian to be chivalrous with an American is a spiritual impossibility, a conradiction in terms.

Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.