There is nothing dictators hate so much as that unassailable, eternally elusive, eternally provoking gleam. One of the main reasons why the very gallant Russian poet Gumilev was put to death by Lenin's ruffians thirty odd years ago was that during the whole ordeal, in the prosecutor's dim office, in the torture house, in the winding corridors that led to the truck, in the truck that took him to the place of execution, and at that place itself, full of the shuffling feet of the clumsy and gloomy shooting squad, the poet kept smiling.

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Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.

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Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.

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Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.

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The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

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I don't think in any language. I think in images.

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Genius is finding the invisible link between things.

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I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.

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I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.

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The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.

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