When truth is replaced by silence,the silence is a lie.

I love sport because I love life, and sport is one of the basic joys of life.

Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?

A poet’s autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.

He who is conceived in a cage yearns for the cage.

How can the confessor teach/ those who are lost and sick at heart,/ when he himself, among the sinners,/ is worst, and most forsaken?/ It is only a game we play/ with other people’s sins./...

Only when the sense of the pain of others begins does man begin.

no one sleeps more beautifully than you. But i am afraid that you will waken just now, and touch me with an indifferent glance, lightly passing, and commit the murder of beauty.

Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.

Quand la vérité est remplacée par le silence, le silence est un mensonge

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!

Time has a way of demonstrating that the most stubborn are the most intelligent.

In Russia all tyrants believe poets to be their worst enemies.

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.

Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful.

Literature has to serve as a moral control of politics.

Sorrow happens, hardship happens, the hell with it, who never knew the price of happiness, will not be happy.

Justice is like a train that is nearly always late.