 Give me a mystery - just a plain and simple one - a mystery which is diffidence and silence, a slim little bare-foot mystery: give me a mystery - just one! |
| Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful. |
| Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers. |
| Time has a way of demonstrating that the most stubborn are the most intelligent. |
| A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote. |
| In Russia all tyrants believe poets to be their worst enemies. |
| He who is conceived in a cage yearns for the cage. |
| Literature has to serve as a moral control of politics. |
| Envy is an insult to oneself. |
| In my blood there is no Jewish blood. In their callous rage, all anti-Semites must hate me now as a Jew. For that reason I am a true Russian. |
| Sorrow happens, hardship happens, the hell with it, who never knew the price of happiness, will not be happy. |
| Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves? |
| Justice is like a train that is nearly always late. |
| Only when the sense of the pain of others begins does man begin. |
| I love sport because I love life, and sport is one of the basic joys of life. |
