There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.

Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.

To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.

I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.

I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.

It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.