“For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.”

Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.

If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?

Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.

First would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position.

I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever.

When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.

In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.

Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God.

For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.

There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.

Religion always remains higher than everyday life. In order to make the elevation towards religion easier for people, religion must be able to alter its forms in relation to the consciousness of modern man.

The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.

The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.

It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.

The law change during the Bush administration gave the Department of Health and Human Services a central role in relocating Central American minors in the United States.

Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.

I don’t know if I have the ability to write an ending like My Fair Lady’s, when everyone gets what they want after a few minor conflicts.

I have a few minor rules for myself but I break them all the time. For example, when translating from Romance languages to English, there is often a choice between a Latinate cognate and a Germanic equivalent.

In this state, dig it, you get twenty years for sale of dope to a minor. You only get five to ten for manslaughter. So like, the thing is, if you’re selling to a kid and cops come, shoot the kid real quick!

When the great Composer shall transpose all the strains of earth from the minor into the major, when the wail of nature shall give way to the glad harmony of the everlasting jubilee.

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.

Most people fail in life because they major in minor things.