“Many contemporary authors drink more than they write.”

When work is a pleasure, life is a joy! When work is a duty, life is slavery.

Truth doesn’t always heal a wounded soul.

A good man can be stupid and still be good. But a bad man must have brains.

Let us not search for the guilty ones only among others, let us speak the bitter truth: we are all guilty each and every one of us.

In the carriages of the past, you can’t go anywhere.

Lies are the religion of slaves and masters. Truth is the god of the free man.

Everywhere, within man and without, there is devastation, instability, chaos, and evidence of some prolonged rout.

Processing the human raw material is naturally more complicated than processing lumber.

In war it is necessary to kill as many people as possible — such is the cynical logic of war. Brutality in a fight is unavoidable; have you seen how cruelly children fight in the streets?

In the maxim of the past you cannot go anywhere.

Be good, be kind, be humane, and charitable; love your fellows; console the afflicted; pardon those who have done you wrong.

Only mothers can think of the future – because they give birth to it in their children.

One has to be able to count if only so that at fifty one doesn’t marry a girl of twenty.

Even a bad man is better than a good book.

There is no one on earth more disgusting and repulsive than he who gives alms. Even as there is no one so miserable as he who accepts them.

The good qualities in our soul are most successfully and forcefully awakened by the power of art. Just as science is the intellect of the world, art is its soul.

As long as God does not intervene in the contemporary universe in such a way as to violate physical laws, science has no way of knowing whether God exists or not.

For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class – contemporary literature is what’s most useful.

That is the real test. Any contemporary novelist should recognize in Patrick O’Brian a Master of the Art.

I read very little contemporary anything.

Disneyworld… is a historical reconstruction as sanitised as the Kremlin’s, and a future vision as uncognisant of contemporary pointers as Peter Pan’s.

This so-called contemporary art is not a form, but a philosophy of society.

In China, we don’t have any contemporary art museums. Until a few years ago, we didn’t even have a gallery.

The boundaries between contemporary art and cinema are so rigid. It’s unbelievable.