Sorrow happens, hardship happens, the hell with it, who never knew the price of happiness, will not be happy.
— Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful.
Only when the sense of the pain of others begins does man begin.
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.
He who is conceived in a cage yearns for the cage.
Literature has to serve as a moral control of politics.
I love sport because I love life, and sport is one of the basic joys of life.
In Russia all tyrants believe poets to be their worst enemies.
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!
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
Justice is like a train that is nearly always late.
Time has a way of demonstrating that the most stubborn are the most intelligent.
Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.
Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?
Envy is an insult to oneself.
