I've always said that I learned the English I know through two sources -- Marvel Comics and Finnegans Wake.

There must be a connection between the lust for power and impotentia coeundi. I liked Marx, I was sure that he and his Jenny had made love merrily. You can feel it in the easy pace of his prose and in his humor. On the other hand, I remember remarking one day in the corridors of the university that if you screwed Krupskaya all the time, you'd end up writing a lousy book like Materialism and Empiriocriticism.

Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame.

The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.

In the Middle Ages, cathendrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.

The faith a movement proclaims doesn't count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is.

The cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia.