Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming in solid colors; the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up, the curve grossly stepped.

Above all, beware of platitudes, i.e., word combinations that have already appeared a thousand times.... As a general rule, try to find new combinations of words (not for the sake of their novelty, but because every person sees things in an individual way and must find his own words for them).

To begin with, let us take the following motto...Literature is Love. Now we can continue.

There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.

I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.

Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.

And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears.