There's a reason every book, even one that isn't very serious, is shaped like a suitcase

Let's assume there really is no such thing as happiness, no such thing as peace, and no freedom either. But there are kind of attacks of senseless ecstasy. Can this be me?

Sales were lukewarm. Back home there was no freedom, but there were readers. Here there was freedom enough, but readers were missing.

If people are rude in Moscow, at least it's in Russian.

Our life is but a grain of sand in the indifferent ocean of infinity.

We are not better than native born Americans, and of course not smarter. We’ve just been to the last stop of this bus.

If Hemingway is to believed, poverty is an invaluable school for a writer. Poverty makes a man clear-sighted. And so on. It's interesting that Hemingway realized this only when he became rich.

Stop thinking. I've stopped some 15 years ago. Otherwise, if you will be thinking you won't want to live. Everyone who thinks is unhappy.

There should not be any excuse. If we don’t like our heritages, we've the power to change them for good. Let’s go beyond using lame excuses...

I have become a queer mixture of the East and the West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere.

Nature inspires me because it's so peaceful. It makes me have an inward experience. It makes me reflective and nostalgic.

Himmler, Bormann, and Goebbels, they were probably bad fellows.

The fundamental purpose of the artist is the same as that of a scientist: to state a fact.

A man who keeps company with glaciers comes to feel tolerably insignificant by and by.

I don't even want to be president!

By the early seventies I had become an Englishman - that is to say, I hated England just as much as half my compatriots seemed to do.

Beyoncé built her f–king foundation from the bottom. I think that’s the exact career every female artist wants to have.

He was, she reflected, almost rudely like a tortoise; and she was glad her friend kept none as pets or they might have suspected mockery.