“The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman.”

The last moments slipped by, one by one, irretrievable.

No deep and strong feeling, such as we may come across here and there in the world, is unmixed with compassion. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim.

It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.

Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.

Love is not weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it.

I hate everything you say, but not enough to kill you for it.

Failure to love is almost like murder.

And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.

Departure beyond the borders of my country is for me equivalent to death.

If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself.

During the last years of Mayakovski’s life, when all poetry had ceased to exist . . . literature had stopped.

And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness.

In this era of world wars, in this atomic age, values have changed. We have learned that we are guests of existence, travelers between two stations. We must discover security within ourselves.

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

He was a natural, and in the Russian way, tragically above these banalities.

No bad man can be a good poet.

I don’t believe there is such a thing as ‘moderate Islam.’ I think it’s better to talk about degrees of belief and degrees of practice.

Archaeopteryx probably cannot tell us much about the early origins of feathers and flight in true protobirds because Archaeopteryx was, in the modern sense, a bird.

Rock ‘n roll is really swing with a modern name. It began on the levees and plantations, took in folk songs, and features blues and rhythm.

I’ve had to adjust to karaoke as a modern reality that obscures our hunt for what we’re truly after.

In turn, we will be tempted to kill our computers, but we won’t dare because we are already utterly, irreversibly dependent on these hopeful monsters that make modern life possible.

The ancient Vedas – the oldest Hindu philosophy – and modern science agree that time is an illusion. If that’s true, there’s no such thing as a past or a future – it’s all one huge now. So what you fix now affects the past and the future.

The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other’s smartphone.

I have a very modern way of thinking; the chef is there to lead the team and not just to sit behind the piano.