I'm a bad Jew, a bad Russian, a bad everything.

Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets.

How delightful to find a friend in everyone.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

For darkness restores what light cannot repair.

I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.

Geography blended with time equals destiny.

Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse

Poetry is what is gained in translation.

I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want.

Humor is the touchstone of the truly mythological as distinct from the more literal-minded and sentimental theological mood.

I have to meditate before I go to bed, always. I have to let the day go and let the eternal in.

Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?

Marriage, like death, is a debt we owe to nature.

The wonderful thing about films is how they can be understood by so many different people on so many different levels.

As a lead singer, all I want to do is be in my own head and think about how great I am. That's a lead singer's disease.

But then it hasn't really been a focus of our government to make us an educated people.

For this is the tragedy of man circumstances change, but he does not.

I hope to see London once ere I die.