 Amin knew that neither West nor East would criticize him for fear that he would support the other side. He felt he was untouchable and he said so openly. |
| In order to feel contempt, you generally need to cherish some kind of feelings. |
| Underground literature only began in the '70s, when technical developments made it possible. Before that, we were involved in a game with the censors. That was our struggle. |
| I'll tell you what colonial experience is. |
| In modern Russia, you have no official, formal assessment of this past. Nobody in any Russian document has said that the policy of the Soviet government was criminal, that it was terrible. No one has ever said this. |
| Money changes all the iron rules into rubber bands. |
| Amin hid nothing. Everybody knew everything. Yet the American Senate only introduced a resolution breaking off trade with Amin three months before his overthrow. |
| The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart. |
| When man meets an obstacle he can't destroy, he destroys himself. |
| Our salvation is in striving to achieve what we know we'll never achieve. |
| My writing is a combination of three elements. The first is travel: not travel like a tourist, but travel as exploration. The second is reading literature on the subject. The third is reflection. |
| There are several reasons why Russians view the oppressive state positively. First, in the Russian Orthodox religion, there is an understanding of authority as something sent by God. |
| Do not be misled by the fact that you are at liberty and relatively free; that for the moment you are not under lock and key: you have simply been granted a reprieve. |
| The Cold War in Africa is one of the darkest, most disgraceful pages in contemporary history, and everybody ought to be ashamed. |
| In the Russian experience, although the Russian state is oppressive, it is their state, it is part of their fabric, and so the relation between Russian citizens and their state is complicated. |
| Amin managed to invite both the US and Soviet ambassadors to his palace at the very same time and then deliberately kept them together in his waiting room. |
| This is the most intimate relationship between literature and its readers: they treat the text as a part of themselves, as a possession. |
| We have such a mixture now, such a fusion of different genres. |
| People were really interested in what was going on because of the international context of the Cold War. |
| I remember in 1978 meeting two Ugandan captains in the hotel talking Russian. They had been educated in Moscow and since they came from different Ugandan peoples, it was the only way they could understand one another. |
