A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth reading.

When we remove the snowdrift piled up over Chekhov in recent years, we uncover a man profoundly agitated by social problems; a writer whose social ideals are the same as those we live by; a philosophy of the divinity of man, of fervent faith in man - the faith that moves mountains.

Now I no longer live in our clear, rational world; I live in the ancient nightmare world, the world of square roots of minus one.

The next stage of development, perhaps in the distant future, will be a social order under which there will be no need for the coercive power of the state.

True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.

Individual consciousness is just sickness.

We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. ("X")