I am no parasite.

Weaknesses have a certain function in a poem... some strategy in order to pave the reader's way to the impact of this or that line.

A writer is defined by the language in which he writes, and I would stick to that definition.

Neither as a writer nor, moreover, as a leader of a nation should you use terminology that obscures the reality of human evil.

Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.

One always pulls the trigger out of self-interest and quotes history to avoid responsibility or pangs of conscience.

American poetry to me is a sort of relentless, nonstop sermon on human autonomy.

Whenever one pulls the trigger in order to rectify history's mistake, one lies. For history makes no mistakes, since it has no purpose.

I wrote poems. That is my work. I am convinced... I believe that what I wrote will be useful to people not only now but in future generations.

A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.

In order to live in a different country, you have to love something there. You have to love something there. You have to love either the spirit of the laws or the economic opportunities, or the - well, history of the country, the language perhaps, literature.

A writer is seldom satisfied with the condition he finds himself in. We're all given to fretting a lot.

I'm no parasite. I'm a poet who will bring honor and glory to his country.

After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.

I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement, that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that he tries to make some sort of change - within himself, not on the outside.

Of course there is no denying the possible pleasure of holing up with a fat, slow-moving, mediocre novel; still, we all know that we can indulge ourselves in that fashion only so much. In the end, we read not for reading's sake, but to learn.

Basically, it's hard for me to assess myself, a hardship not only prompted by the immodesty of the enterprise, but because one is not capable of assessing himself, let alone his work. However, if I were to summarize, my main interest is the nature of time. That's what interests me most of all. What time can do to a man.

Contrary to popular belief, the outskirts are not where the world ends - they are precisely where it begins to unfurl.

I like the idea of isolation. I like the reality of it. You realize what you are... not that the knowledge is inevitably rewarding.

In terms of freedom, America doesn't invite any comparison to Russia. It would be silly to make one. Every line that I care to write, I can have printed. There is no point to even talk about degrees.

Writers seem mesmerized by the state - the temporal entity. The word 'perestroika' is impressed somehow on our minds. But that is not the duty of a writer.

Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment.

On the whole, infinity is a fairly palpable aspect of this business of publishing, if only because it extends a dead author's existence beyond the limits he envisioned, or provides a living author with a future he cannot measure. In other words, this business deals with the future which we all prefer to regard as unending.

The charge frequently leveled against poetry - that it is difficult, obscure, hermetic and whatnot - indicates not the state of poetry but, frankly, the rung of the evolutionary ladder on which society is stuck.