No matter under what circumstances you leave it, home does not cease to be home. No matter how you lived there—well or poorly.

By itself reality per se isn't worth a damn. It's perception that promotes reality to meaning.

No matter under what circumstances you leave it, home does not cease to be home. No matter how you lived there-well or poorly.

You cannot cover a ruin with a page of 'Pravda.'

When you have those two languages - an analytic one like English and a synthetic, very sensual thing like Russian, you get almost a psychotic sense of humanity that permeates nearly everything. It can help you understand, and it can discourage you, because you see how little can be done.

I was fortunate enough to write about things I really love, and love can be very analytic.

One of the worst things that can happen to an artist is to perceive himself as the owner of his art, and art as his tool. A product of the marketplace sensibility, this attitude barely differs on a psychological plane from the patron's view of the artist as a paid employee.

The career of an esthete was nothing I ever intended.

A writer should care about one thing - the language. To write well - that is his duty. That is his only duty.

Tyranny will make an entire population into readers of poetry.