This twenty-year-old boy was distinguished from childhood by strange qualities, a dreamer and an eccentric. A girl fell in love with him, and he went and sold her to a brothel.

Why try to pursue what is completed?

"We speak different languages, as usual," responded Woland, "but this does not change the things we speak about. Well?..."

To struggle against censorship, whatever its nature, and whatever the power under which it exists, is my duty as a writer, as are calls for freedom of the press. I am a passionate supporter of that freedom, and I consider that if any writer were to imagine that he could prove he didn't need that freedom, then he would be like a fish affirming in public that it didn't need water.

Once upon a time there was a lady. She had no children, and no happiness either. And at first she cried for a long time, but then she became wicked.

There's only one degree of freshness — the first, which makes it also the last

Once in 1919, when I was traveling at night by train, I wrote a short story. In the town where the train stopped, I took the story to the publisher of the newspaper who published the story.