231 Quotes by Mikhail Bulgakov

A writer isn’t a writer because he has a membership card but because he writes. How do you know what bright ideas may not be swarming in my head?

Soon the room had that desolate look that comes from the chaos of packing up to go away and, worse, from removing the shade from the lamp. Never, never take the shade off a lamp. A lampshade is something sacred. Scuttle away like a rat from danger and into the unknown. Read or doze beside your lampshade; let the storm howl outside and wait until they come for you.

Allow me to ask you, then, how man can govern if he cannot plan for even so ridiculously short a span as a thousand years or so, if, in fact, he cannot guarantee his own next day?

And to the revenge – on the hacks, the yes-men, the snitches, the hypocrites – that the novel declines to rise above.

Bulgakov began work on the first version of the novel early in 1929, or possibly at the end of 1928.

I don’t have any special talents, just an ordinary desire to live like a human being.

Yes, man is mortal, but that would still be just a minor problem. The bad thing is that he’s sometimes suddenly mortal, and that’s the whole point! And he can’t possibly say what he’s going to be doing the same evening.

The pantry was cool and smelled of mice and boots.

There’s only one degree of freshness – the first, which makes it also the last.