“Art is unthinkable without risk and spiritual self-sacrifice.”

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.

In every generation there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it.

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.