Sorrow happens, hardship happens, the hell with it, who never knew the price of happiness, will not be happy.

Literature has to serve as a moral control of politics.

He watched through a crack inside just pretending to be dead he wanted to fix each pallbearer in his memory . . . it seems to me a telephone was installed in the coffin to someone yet again Stalin is sending his instructions.

In my blood there is no Jewish blood. In their callous rage, all anti-Semites must hate me now as a Jew. For that reason I am a true Russian.

When there is freedom of speech, I've found that the majority of people really have nothing to say.

In Russia all tyrants believe poets to be their worst enemies.

He who is conceived in a cage, yearns for the cage.