"Agitprop sticks in my teeth too, and I'd rather compose romances for you – more profit in it and more charm. But I subdued myself, setting my heel on the throat of my own song."

"A rhyme's … a barrel of dynamite. A line is a fuse that's lit. The line smoulders, the rhyme explodes – and by a stanza a city is blown to bits."

"In parade deploying the armies of my pages, I shall inspect the regiments in line. Heavy as lead, my verses at attention stand, ready for death and for immortal fame."

"No gray hairs streak my soul, no grandfatherly fondness there! I shake the world with the might of my voice, and walk – handsome, twentytwoyearold."

"What message, years of conflagration, have you: madness or hope? On thin cheeks strained by war and liberation bloody reflections still remain."

"Hey, you! Heaven! Off with your hat! I am coming! Not a sound. The universe sleeps, its huge paw curled upon a star-infested ear."

"He was perhaps the only tolerable propaganda poet of all time: he meant it, and the energy he put into it was, as is frequently said, demonic."

"Incomprehensible rubbish."

"On the pavement of my trampled soul the steps of madmen weave the prints of rude crude words."

"Tramp squares with rebellious treading! Up heads! As proud peaks be seen! In the second flood we are spreading Every city on earth will be clean."

"Love's ship has foundered on the rocks of life. We're quits: stupid to draw up a list of mutual sorrows, hurts and pains."

"I understand the power and the alarm of words – Not those that they applaud from theatre-boxes, but those which make coffins break from bearers and on their four oak legs walk right away."

"Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it."

"Love for us is no paradise of arbors — to us love tells us, humming, that the stalled motor of the heart has started to work again."

"Art must not be concentrated in dead shrines called museums. lt must be spread everywhere – on the streets, in the trams, factories, workshops, and in the workers' homes."

"You don't have to be a poet, but you do have to be a citizen. Well, Mayakovsky was not a citizen, he was a lackey, who served Stalin faithfully. He added his babble to the magnification of the immortal image of the leader and teacher."

"Grip your gun like a man, brother! Let's have a crack at Holy Russia, Mother Russia with her big, fat arse! Freedom, freedom! Down with the cross!"

"With this man, the newness of our times was climatically and uniquely in his blood. His very strangeness was one with the strangeness of the age, an age still half unrealised."

"I want to be understood by my country, but if I fail to be understood – what then?, I shall pass through my native land to one side, like a shower of slanting rain."

"In Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita, the Devil comes to Moscow. What follows is a fearful spiral of denunciation, disappearance and death, at once arbitrary and spiteful, calculated and yet deranged. No work better captures the loathsome quality of the Terror; no scene gets closer to illuminating the surreal atmosphere of the show trials than Nikanor Bosoy's nightmare of being exposed as a foreign currency dealer while sitting in the audience of a variety show in a Moscow theatre. For not every act in the drama required Stalin's instigation; his role was to create an environment in which ordinary men and women - even members of the same family - would denounce one another; in which today's torturer could be tomorrow's victim; in which today's camp commandant could spend the night in the punishment cells."

"'You're not Dostoevsky,' said the citizeness, who was getting muddled by Koroviev."

"Only if some microorganism doesn't attack these tender hothouse plants and eat away at their roots, only if they don't rot! And that can happen with pineapples! Oh, yes, indeed it can!"

"They have read your novel . . . and they said only one thing, that, unfortunately, it is not finished. So I wanted to show you your hero. He has been sitting here for about two thousand years, sleeping, but, when the moon is full, he is tormented, as you see, by insomnia. And it torments not only him, but his faithful guardian, the dog. If it is true that cowardice is the most grave vice, then the dog, at least, is not guilty of it. The only thing that brave creature ever feared was thunderstorms. But what can be done, the one who loves must share the fate of the one who is loved."

"'I had the pleasure of meeting that young man at the Patriarch's Ponds. He almost drove me mad myself, proving to me that I don't exist. But you do believe that it is really I?'"

"'Never ask for anything! Never for anything, and especially from those who are stronger than you. They'll make the offer themselves, and give everything themselves.'"

"'For some reason, cats are usually addressed familiarly, though no cat has ever drunk bruderschaft with anyone.'"

"No documents, no person."

"Manuscripts don't burn."

"'Unfortunately I cannot show it to you,' replied the master, 'because I burned it in my stove.I'm sorry but I don't believe you,' said Woland. 'You can't have done. Manuscripts don't burn.'"

"It was clear to him that he had lost something irretrievably that day, and that now he wanted to make up for the loss with minor, inconsequential, and most importantly, belated measures."

"Gods, my gods! How sad the earth is at eventide! How mysterious are the mists over the swamps. Anyone who has wandered in these mists, who has suffered a great deal before death, or flown above the earth, bearing a burden beyond his strength knows this. Someone who is exhausted knows this. And without regret he forsakes the mists of the earth, its swamps and rivers, and sinks into the arms of death with a light heart knowing that death alone . . ."

"How sad, ye gods, how sad the world is at evening, how mysterious the mists over the swamps. You will know it when you have suffered greatly before dying, when you have walked through the world carrying an unbearable burden. You know it too when you are weary and ready to leave this earth without regret; it's mists, it's swamps and it's rivers; ready to give yourself into the arms of death with a light heart, knowing that death alone can comfort you."

"'Once upon a time there was a lady. She had no children, and no happiness either. And at first she cried for a long time, but then she became wicked . . .'"

"Follow me reader! Who told you that there is no true, faithful, eternal love in this world! May the liar's vile tongue be cut out!"

"The hope that she might regain her happiness made her fearless."

"`Second freshness - that's what is nonsense! There is only one freshness - the first - and it is also the last. And if sturgeon is of the second freshness, that means it is simply rotten.'"

"'What's the use of dying in a ward surrounded by a lot of groaning and croaking incurables? Wouldn't it be much better to throw a party with that twenty-seven thousand and take poison and depart for the other world to the sound of violins, surrounded by lovely drunken girls and happy friends?'"

"We have no idea whether there were any other strange occurences in Moscow that night, and we have no intention of trying to find out, since the time has come for us to proceed to Part Two of this true narrative. Follow me, reader!"

"'Don't be afraid, Queen … don't be afraid, Queen, the blood has long since gone into the earth. And where it was spilled, grapevines are already growing.'"

"The procurator studied the new arrival with avid, and slightly fearful eyes. It was the kind of look one gives someone one has heard of and thought a lot about, and whom one is meeting for the first time."

"[S]aid the not entirely suppressed old Ivan, rearing his head from inside the new one, although without much confidence."

"‘He's clever,' thought Ivan,' I must admit there are some smart people even among the intelligentsia'"

"There was something uncommonly fake and uncertain in every line of these articles, depite their threatening and self-assured tone. I kept thinking . . . that the authors of these articles weren't saying what they wanted to say, and that that was why they were so furious."

"Ryukhin showed himself no mercy-'I don't believe in anything I've ever written!'"

"Well, as everyone knows, once witchcraft gets started, there's no stopping it."

"Foreign visitors . . . how impressed you all are with foreign visitors! But they come in many different varieties."

"The tongue can conceal the truth, but the eyes never! You're asked an unexpected question, you don't even flinch, it takes just a second to get yourself under control, you know just what you have to say to hide the truth, and you speak very convincingly, and nothing in your face twitches to give you away. But the truth, alas, has been disturbed by the question, and it rises up from the depths of your soul to flicker in your eyes and all is lost."

"'Oh, no, you don't look like a halfwit,' the procurator replied quietly and smiled some strange smile."

"In fact, I'm beginning to fear that this confusion will go on for a long time. And all because he writes down what I said incorrectly."

"'I do not know these good men,' replied the prisoner."